D2EEC: A Distributed Degree-Based Energy Efficient Clustering Algorithm for Wireless Sensor Networks

Information gathering is one of typical applications in wireless sensor networks, where energy-constrained sensors are densely deployed to collect environmental information and transmit data to a base station for further processing. Sensors directly transmit data to a far away base station may quickly drain their batteries and greatly shorten the network lifetime. Partitioning network into several clusters may improve the energy usage efficiency of the network and prolong the network lifetime. In this paper, we propose a distributed degree-based energy efficient clustering (D2EEC) algorithm for wireless sensor networks. In the D2EEC, each node elects itself to be a cluster head with a novel probability function, which is tightly related to node degree and energy. We find that the D2EEC algorithm can terminate in a few iterations. Simulation results show that D2EEC is very effective to prolong the network lifetime