An Energy-aware Clustering Technique for Wireless Sensor Networks

A wireless sensor network (WSN) is a specialized wireless network that composes of a number of sensor nodes deployed in a specified area for monitoring environment conditions such as temperature, air pressure, humidity, light, motion or vibration, and so on. The sensor nodes are usually programmed to monitor or collect data from surrounding environment and pass the information to the base station for remote user access through various communication technologies. Figure 1 shows general wireless sensor network architecture. Typically, a sensor node is a small device that consists of four basic components as shown in Figure 2: 1) sensing subsystem for data gathering from its environment, 2) processing subsystem for data processing and data storing, 3) wireless communication subsystem for data transmission and 4) energy supply subsystem which is a power source for the sensor node. However, sensor nodes have small memory, slow processing speed, and scarce energy supply. These limitations are typical characteristics of sensor nodes in wireless sensor networks.