Adaptive and Energy Efficient Clustering Algorithm for Event-Driven Application in Wireless Sensor Networks (AEEC)

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) consist of a large number of small, low data rate and inexpensive nodes that communicate in order to sense or control a physical phenomenon. The major difference between the WSN and the traditional wireless network is that sensors are very sensitive to energy consumption. Moreover, the performance of the sensor network applications highly depends on the lifetime of the network and we expect the lifetime of several months to several years. Thus, energy saving is crucial in designing long-lived wireless sensor networks. Many researchers have focused on developing energy efficient cluster based protocols for WSNs, but there has not been much research on event driven WSNs and, their focus is on continuous driven networks. In this paper, we propose a modified algorithm of Low Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy (LEACH) protocol which is a well known energy efficient clustering algorithm for WSNs. Our modified protocol called “Adaptive and Energy Efficient Clustering Algorithm for Event-Driven Application in Wireless Sensor Networks (AEEC)” is aimed at prolonging the lifetime of a sensor network by balancing energy usage of the nodes. AEEC makes the nodes with more residual energy have more chances to be selected as cluster head. Also, we use elector nodes which take the responsibility of collecting energy information of the nearest sensor nodes and selecting the cluster head. We compared the performance of our AEEC algorithm with the LEACH protocol using simulations.