Optimizing Energy Consumption in Vehicular Sensor Networks by Clustering Using Fuzzy C-means and Fuzzy Subtractive Algorithms

Traffic monitoring and managing in urban intelligent transportation systems (ITS) can be carried out based on vehicular sensor networks. In a vehicular sensor network, vehicles equipped with sensors such as GPS, can act as mobile sensors for sensing the urban traffic and sending the reports to a traffic monitoring center (TMC) for traffic estimation. The energy consumption by the sensor nodes is a main problem in the wireless sensor networks (WSNs); moreover, it is the most important feature in designing these networks. Clustering the sensor nodes is considered as an effective solution to reduce the energy consumption of WSNs. Each cluster should have a Cluster Head (CH), and a number of nodes located within its supervision area. The cluster heads are responsible for gathering and aggregating the information of clusters. Then, it transmits the information to the data collection center. Hence, the use of clustering decreases the volume of transmitting information, and, consequently, reduces the energy consumption of network. In this paper, Fuzzy C-Means (FCM) and Fuzzy Subtractive algorithms are employed to cluster sensors and investigate their performance on the energy consumption of sensors. It can be seen that the FCM algorithm and Fuzzy Subtractive have been reduced energy consumption of vehicle sensors up to 90.68% and 92.18%, respectively. Comparing the performance of the algorithms implies the 1.5 percent improvement in Fuzzy Subtractive algorithm in comparison.