MEECA: MiSense Energy Efficient Clustering Algorithm

Wireless sensor network is among the fastest growing technologies that have the potential of changing our lives drastically. Energy efficiency is a key design objective in most of the research related to wireless sensor networks because the nodes are severely energy constrained, and battery replenishment is often not practical. Therefore, prolonged network lifetime, scalability, and load balancing are important requirements for many ad-hoc sensor network applications. To satisfy these requirements, MiSense, a generic energy- efficient middleware architecture has been proposed. MiSense uses a low-power communication model and an energy-efficient resource allocation technique to achieve application throughput and latency requirements for wireless sensor networks while minimizing energy usage to increase application lifetime. The large-scale deployment of wireless sensor networks and the need for data aggregation necessitate efficient organization of the network topology for the purpose of balancing the load and prolonging the network lifetime. Clustering has proven to be an effective approach for organizing the network into a connected hierarchy. In this paper we present MEECA (MiSense energy efficient clustering algorithm) used in the MiSense middleware, which is a novel clustering mechanism where clusters are organized in a distributed and energy-efficient way through local communication among neighboring sensor nodes.