Independent Neighbour Set based Clustering Algorithm for Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks

Efficient energy consumption of sensor devices is a prominent problem in battery constrained, unattended wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and it directly influence on WSN lifetime. Designing energy-aware routing protocol can significantly reduce energy consumption in WSNs. Grouping of sensor nodes into clusters is a proficient routing technique for reducing the energy depletion of the nodes in the WSN. In this work, a novel multi-branch tree based clustering approach is proposed to extend the lifetime of the WSNs. A number of branches and selection of cluster heads are performed based on the independent neighbour set properties of nodes. For this, a maximum of five branches constructed by the algorithm and these branches are grown to different direction using the nature of INS. In this approach, inter-cluster communication distance is drastically minimized and evenly distributed the energy consumption of nodes over the network. The performance of the proposed algorithm is compared with the traditional existing methods in terms of cluster structure, nodes energy distribution and network lifetime through the extensive simulations.