An Energy Efficient Cluster Formation and Maintenance Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

Nowadays, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) comprise a tremendously growing infrastructure for monitoring the physical or environmental conditions of objects. WSNs pose challenges to mitigating energy dissipation by constructing a reliable and energy saving network. In this paper, we propose a novel network construction and routing method by defining three different duties for sensor nodes, that is, node gateways, cluster heads, and cluster members, and then by applying a hierarchical structure from the sink to the normal sensing nodes. This method provides an efficient rationale to support the maximum coverage, to recover missing data with node mobility, and to reduce overall energy dissipation. All this should lengthen the lifetime of the network significantly.