Balancing Energy Dissipation in Clustered Wireless Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks, unbalanced energy dissipation is one of the major causes for hot spots. The many-to-one communication pattern used by sensor nodes in most of the data gathering applications leads to such unbalanced energy consumption. Cluster-based protocols attempt to solve this problem by load balancing within the cluster and rotating the job of cluster head every few rounds. However, the energy consumption still remains unbalanced because the cluster formation process does not include all the parameters required for balanced energy consumption in the network. Therefore, an optimized cluster formation process which considers the overall network metrics for energy consumption is highly desirable in solving such problems. We introduce an approach to determine the energy dissipation behavior in the sensor deployment area and present results and analysis from our novel multi-criterion cluster formation technique. Simulation results and statistical analysis verify that our technique achieves balanced energy dissipation in the network.