Dynamic Cluster Head Selection in WSN

A Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) comprises an ad-hoc network of nodes laden with sensors that are used to monitor a region mostly in the outdoors and often not easily accessible. Despite exceptions, several deployments of WSN continue to grapple with the limitation of finite energy derived through batteries. Thus, it is imperative that the energy of a WSN be conserved and its life prolonged. An important direction of work to this end is towards the transmission of data between nodes in a manner that minimum energy is expended. One approach to doing this is cluster-based routing, wherein nodes in a WSN are organised into clusters, and transmission of data from the node is through a representative node called a cluster-head. Forming optimal clusters and choosing an optimal cluster-head is an NP-Hard problem. Significant work is done towards devising mechanisms to form clusters and choosing cluster heads to reduce the transmission overhead to a minimum. In this article, an approach is proposed to create clusters and identify cluster heads that are near optimal. The approach involves two-stage clustering, with the clustering algorithm for each stage chosen through an exhaustive search. Furthermore, unlike existing approaches that choose a cluster-head on the basis of the residual energy of nodes, the proposed approach utilises three factors in addition to the residual energy, namely the distance of a node from the cluster centroid, the distance of a node from the final destination (base-station), and the connectivity of the node. The approach is shown to be effective and economical through extensive validation via simulations and through a real-world prototypical implementation.