Fault-Tolerant and Energy-Efficient Generic Clustering Protocol for Heterogeneous WSNs

Abstract—In the context of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), where sensors have limited energy power, it is necessary to carefully manage this scarce resource by saving communications. Clustering is considered as an effective scheme to increase the scalability and lifetime of wireless sensor networks. Moreover, failures and topological changes are inevitable in sensor networks due to the inhospitable environment, unattended deployment or nodes mobility. Therefore, one of the wanted properties of WSNs is the fault tolerance and adaptivity to topological changes. We propose a fault-tolerant and energy-efficient distributed self-stabilizing clustering protocol based on message-passing for het-erogeneous wireless sensor networks. This protocol is adapted to topological changes, optimizes energy consumption and prolongs the network lifetime by minimizing the number of messages involved in the construction of clusters. Our generic clusterin