Further observations on the SNL wireless Sensor Network Leadership protocol

It is sometimes important to have a local leader for a set of wireless sensor nodes. Such a leader may be used as the origin of a coordinate system, as the node responsible for communication, etc. Thus it is important to have a reliable and correct method to assign nodes as leaders. We presented the sensor network leadership (SNL) protocol in previous work. Here we present further properties of this protocol: (1) SNL is an optimal leadership protocol in terms of messages sent, and (2) various statistics concerning the clusters formed by this protocol are given, and in particular, it is noted that in the limit, the cluster placement is similar to circle packing where the radius of the circles is the broadcast range of a sensor device.