A Centralized Energy-Efficient Clustering Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Energy saving is one of the hot research topics in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), and a number of solutions have been proposed. Clustering protocols have become the widely used method to reduce energy consumption. However, the energy efficiency in existing clustering protocols is limited because of the excessive energy consumption in periodic reclustering. In this article, we propose a centralized energy-efficient clustering (CEEC) protocol, which includes two aspects of node energy balancing schemes, to enhance energy efficiency in WSNs. As for intracluster energy balancing, we employ the cluster head (CH)-rotation approach to balance the energy load among nodes in each cluster. With respect to intercluster energy balancing, we suggest four sequential algorithms to balance the energy consumption among clusters, and the main contributions are as follows: 1) a size-balanced cluster formation (SBCF) algorithm aims to partition the whole network into several small clusters of the same size; 2) a low-cost forecast-based maintenance mechanism is raised to help the base station (BS) maintain the total nodes’ energy information of each cluster in the network, and then, BS utilizes our introduced intercluster energy adjustment (ICEA) algorithm to reallocate a few cluster members in related clusters with low overhead; and 3) an energy-aware data forwarding (EDF) scheme is to maintain the nodes’ energy balance among clusters in intercluster communication. Simulation results show that our CEEC protocol outperforms the classical clustering mechanisms in terms of network lifetime, energy consumption, and network throughput.