Distributed Energy Efficient Cluster Formation for Wireless Sensor Networks

In large scale wireless sensor networksclustering is often used for improving energyefficiency and achieving scalable performance. In theclustered environment, data gathered by the nodes istransmitted to the base station through cluster-heads(CHs). As the nodes will communicate data overshorter distances in such an environment, the energyspent in the network is likely to be substantiallylower compared to when every sensor communicatesdirectly to the base station. The essential operationin sensor node clustering is to select a set of clusterheadsfrom the set of nodes in the network, and thencluster the remaining nodes with these heads. In thispaper, we propose a distributed energy efficientcluster formation (DEECF) algorithm for wirelesssensor networks. The cluster-head selectionalgorithm of DEECF is extended the LEACH’sstochastic cluster-head selection algorithm byconsidering the additional parameters, the residualenergy of the node relative to the residual energy ofthe network. We also compare our DEECF withLEACH in terms of network lifetime. The simulationresults demonstrate that DEECF can achieve highenergy efficiency and prolong network lifetime