Stepwise Clustering Algorithm for Wireless Sensor Networks

1 This work was supported by MEXT/JSPS Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research(C) Grant Number (22500071). Abstract Sensor networks consisting of nodes with limited battery power and wireless communications are deployed to collect useful information from the field. Gathering sensed information in an energy efficient manner is critical to operate the sensor network for a long period of time. LEACH is very energy-efficient routing protocol based on clustering of the sensor nodes. However, energy consumption of nodes tends to become uneven in LEACH. HEED improves the LEACH clustering algorithm by using information of residual electric power of nodes. Although HEED provides better performance than LEACH, it does not consider the number of adjacent nodes. Therefore, the cluster head does not efficiently cover the nodes in HEED. HIT and MR-LEACH are based on a small transmission range and multi-hop communication. Though these methods have improved the performance dramatically, unbalance of the electric power consumption is remained. In this paper, we propose energy-efficient clustering algorithm considering adjacent nodes and residual electric power. Characteristics of our approach are stepwise clustering from an initial cluster head and dynamic change of cluster size.