Passive Clustering for Efficient Energy Conservation in Wireless Sensor Network

A wireless sensor network is a set of miniature nodes that consume little energy and route information to a base station. It will enable reliable monitoring of a wide variety of phenomena for civilian, military and medical applications. Almost any sensor network application requires some form of self-organisation to route information. Recent years many protocols for network self-organization and management have been proposed and being implemented. Hierarchical clustering algorithms are very important in increasing the network’s life time. The most important point in this algorithm is cluster head selection and cluster formation because a good clustering guarantees reliability, energy efficiency and load balancing in the network. In this paper, we will use the principles of passive clustering to propose a new mechanism for selecting clusterheads. This mechanism allows the election of an alternate for each cluster head and a dynamic balancing of the role of clusterhead to the alternate when leaving or failure. Thus, it provides several advantages network reliability, stability of clusters and reduces energy consumption among the sensor nodes. Comparison with the existing schemes such as Passive Clustering and GRIDS (Geographically Repulsive Insomnious Distributed Sensors) reveals that the mechanism for selecting an alternate for clusterhead nodes, which is the most important factor influencing the clustering performance, can significantly improves the network lifetime.