Two-phase data traffic optimization of wireless sensor networks for prolonging network lifetime

Wireless network sensing and control systems are becoming increasingly important in many application domains due to advent of nanotechnology. The size of a wireless sensor network can easily reach hundreds or even thousands of sensor nodes. Since these types of networks usually have limited battery resources, power consumption optimization for prolonging system lifetime of such networks have received a great attention by the researchers in this field in recent years. In this paper, a centralized approach for clustering and data transmission mechanism is proposed that optimizes the power consumption and hence lifetime of the network. The mechanism is comprised of two phases. In the first phase, a mechanism based on a centralized cluster head selection that utilizes information such as nodes residual energies and their locations in the network is proposed in order to select the most appropriate candidates as cluster heads. In the second phase, the concept of a "window size" is introduced where minimization of the number of cluster head changes of a node and consequently maximization of the network lifetime is considered. Simulation results validate that the proposed mechanism does effectively reduce data traffic and therefore increases network lifetime.