LBCM: Energy-efficient clustering method in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are a collection of battery-powered sensor nodes deployed in an environment that is most of the time isolated in nature. Usually, the power consumes in WSNs is due to sensing or sensed data forwarding. The data forwarding operation requires communication among nodes and its forwarding node (usually cluster head). Therefore, the design of an algorithm which can make a cluster and chooses a cluster head play a vital role in WSNs. Our objective is to perform energy-efficient communication between sensor nodes and broaden the network's lifetime by balancing the load of less energy-constrained gateways. Clustering is an effective technique to lessen the sensor nodes' energy dissipation in a wide-range wireless sensor network to increase the network's lifetime and obtain scalability and robustness. Though, if any of the gateways remain overloaded by a massive quantity of sensor nodes, it may fall soon, and the network's lifetime can end in a short duration. Therefore, it is necessary to adjust the gateways' load to prolong the network's lifetime. The paper includes a newly introduced algorithm named LBCM (Load Balanced Clustering Method) that adjusts the gateways' load and performs energy-efficient communication among the sensor nodes in WSNs. The simulation outcome of the introduced algorithm shows that our proposal is more energy-efficient than the existing algorithm.

Keywords

• load balancing
• energy efficiency
• clustering
• communication cost
• wireless sensor network