Efficient Cluster Formation for Sensor Networks

The interest in wireless sensor networks is growing and the development of energy efficient infrastructures for such networks is becoming increasingly important. In this paper we investigate the usefulness of enforcing a minimum separation distance between cluster heads in a cluster based sensor network, i.e. prolonging network lifetime by lowering the energy consumption. The simulations where performed in order to determine how much we can lower the energy consumption in the sensor network by separating the cluster heads. We have also investigated how the number of clusters affect the energy consumption for a given minimum separation distance. We show that our sensor network performs up to 150% better when introducing a minimum separation distance between cluster heads, comparing the number of messages received at the base station. The simulations also show that the minimum separation distance that result in the lowest energy consumption in our network varies with the number of clusters.