Energy Efficient Clustering for Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks – A Survey

Ongoing advancements in electromechanical, power electronics and wireless communications have made possible the use of wireless sensor networks in remote applications. A wide range of applications such as monitoring of environmental conditions, forest fire protection, disaster management, and target monitoring in military applications utilize these sensor networks to solve problems. This has made wireless sensor networks the hottest topic for research today. These remote and unattended applications require a huge number of sensor nodes working efficiently together for a common goal. Since sensor nodes have limited resources, like processing, power and sensing capacity, these resources need to be used in efficient manner in order to improve a network's lifetime. One of the most important methods to achieve this is using clusters. Nodes may not have the same energy levels, which makes it even more important for these clusters to work efficiently together to save power. Wireless sensor networks are of homogeneous and heterogeneous type. This paper presents a survey of energy-efficient clustering mechanisms in heterogeneous wireless sensor networks. Nodes in homogeneous wireless sensor networks have similar resources, however heterogeneous networks have nodes with different energy levels that can be effectively used to enhance a network's lifetime.