An energy-efficient clustering algorithm for wireless sensor networks

This paper presents an energy-efficient clustering algorithm, named EECA for short, which contains two steps: first, the node with the highest residual energy is selected as the anchor cluster-head, and the candidate cluster-heads are determined according to their residual energy as well as the distance from the anchor cluster-head; second, the candidate cluster-heads compete to be the cluster-heads via a delayed broadcast mechanism. Comparing with the well-known protocol LEACH, the two-step cluster-head selection mechanism balances the distribution of the cluster-heads. Simulations show that the proposed algorithm can prolong the network lifetime significantly.