An energy efficient distributed clustering approach with assistant nodes in wireless sensor networks

Clustering the sensor nodes is one of the most popular and an effective approach for applications that require scalability to hundreds or thousands of nodes. The conventional algorithms consider various parameters to evenly distribute the energy load. However, energy consumption problem of the cluster head is still remained. In this paper, we propose a novel clustering approach that periodically elects cluster heads and assistant nodes together. The assistant nodes substitute for each cluster head to transmit sensor readings to the base station. In the result of performance evaluation, our proposed clustering algorithm achieves about 10% ~ 40% performance improvements over the existing clustering algorithms in terms of lifetime.