A Novel Cooperative Clustering Approach for Wireless Sensor Networks

A sensor network consists of many, spatially sensors to monitor environment such as tem-perature, sound, or pollutants. Each sensor is equipped with a radio transceiver, a small microcontroller, and an energy source for transporting data to a distant base station (BS). Network lifetime, scalability, and load balancing are important requirements for many data gathering sensor network applications. Network clustering is an effective approach for achieving these goals wherein sensors in the network are grouped into clusters. As introduced in almost conventional clustering approaches, in each cluster, there is a particular node existing in each cluster, which is called head node, while the other nodes are called member nodes. The head node is in charge of collecting data from its member nodes in the cluster, aggregating these data into one single data packet, and transmitting the compressive data to the BS. Since receiving, aggregating, and transmitting to the BS are all accomplished by the head node, energy of the head node is soon depleted. In this paper, we propose a new data gathering approach wherein both data gathering and data aggregating are performed by the same node but data reporting to the BS ma