Performance evaluation of optimal sized cluster based wireless sensor networks with correlated data aggregation consideration

This paper aims at proposing a network structure to minimize the energy consumption in cluster-based wireless sensor networks (WSNs), which is directly related to the lifetime of the network. In large scale wireless sensor networks, data aggregation is known as an effective technique to save the energy by a trade off between the complexity of local processing and the amount of data transmitted in networks. Normally, in cluster-based WSNs, the sensor node which is elected as the cluster head will become the aggregation point which has the responsibility to aggregate the data from cluster members. In this paper, we analyze the aggregation characteristic in a correlated data field, and then find out the optimal cluster radius for each sensor node in the case of that node has been elected as cluster head. Furthermore, we propose a novel network structure called Unbalanced Clustering (UBC) and compare it to a LEACH-like cluster based network and an equal-sized cluster based network to see how much energy UBC can save and the potentiality of making the energy dissemination among the sensor nodes more evenly.