Load-balanced clustering of wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks have potential to monitor environments for both military and civil applications. Due to inhospitable conditions these sensors are not always deployed uniformly ion the area of interest. Since sensors are generally constrained in on-board energy supply, efficient management of the network is crucial to extend the life of the sensors. Sensors´ energy cannot support long haul communication to reach a remote command site and thus requires many levels of hops or a gateway to forward the data on behalf of the sensor. In this paper, we propose an algorithm to network these sensors in to well define clusters with less energy-constrained gateway nodes acting as cluster-heads, and balance load among these gateways. Simulation results show how our approach can balance the load and improve the lifetime of the system.