Quasi-dynamic Load Balanced Clustering Protocol for Energy Efficient Wireless Sensor Networks

Miscellaneous issues related to wireless sensor networks (WSN) like clustering of sensor nodes, load balancing amongst the cluster heads, energy efficient multipath routing, prevention of communication failures, storage of information etc. are receiving increasing interest now a days. Hence, addressing these issues with the restriction of computational constraint and limited power supply is a challenging task to be performed. In regard to this, design of energy efficient clustering and routing algorithms have gained proper attention over the last few years because of their contribution towards the appropriate utilization of available energy and extension of network lifetime. In this paper, we propose a quasi dynamic clustering algorithm with an objective to prolong the network lifetime by reducing energy consumption of sensor nodes. Entire set of sensor nodes has been divided into two sets depending upon their proximity to the nearest gateways. Nodes from the first set are assigned to the fixed set of gateways while those from the other set are associated dynamically on the basis of instantaneous network statistics. Performance of the proposed algorithm has been demonstrated by means of extensive simulation studies. It has finally been substantiated that the proposed clustering protocol shows comprehensive improvement with respect to existing algorithms in terms of number of active sensor nodes, network life time, energy consumption etc.