Energy Efficient Clustering Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks: A Survey

Wireless sensor networks are application specific networks composed of large number of sensor nodes. Limited energy resource of sensor nodes make efficient energy consumption of nodes as main design issue. Energy efficiency is achieved from hardware level to network protocol levels. Clustering of nodes is an effective approach to reduce energy consumption of nodes. Clustering algorithms group nodes in independent clusters. Each cluster has atleast one cluster head. Nodes send data to respective cluster heads. Cluster heads send data to base station. Clustering algorithms prolong network lifetime by avoiding long distance communication of nodes to base station. In literature various clustering approaches are proposed. Work of this paper discusses working of few of them and distinguishes them according to operational mode and state of clustering. Work of this paper helps to understand classification of clustering schemes.