An energy-efficient protocol architecture with multiple clustering for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN), provides versatile computing platforms for the applications such as environmental monitoring and military field surveillance. The WSN deployed in these applications are usually faced with harsh environments which makes it very hard or impossible to recharge their node batteries. So it is necessary to fabricate specific protocol for WSN to enable its nodes efficiently utilize their energy. Motivated by this practical demand, a hierarchical protocol architecture with multiple clustering for WSN is proposed in this paper. A distributed multiple clustering policy, in which the nodes are chosen to be act as the cluster heads in certain probability, is applied to enables the self organization of large numbers of nodes. These cluster heads constitute the routing infrastructure and aggregate data from their neighboring non-cluster nodes. Among the cluster heads, the one with more residual energy is picked out to be the super node. The cluster heads does not need to transfer information directly to the base station but to the super node through which the information will be transferred to the base station. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed approach is effective in prolonging the network lifecycle and supporting scalable data aggregation.