Density Aware Energy Efficient Clustering Protocol for Normally Distributed Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), cluster based data routing protocols have the advantages of reducing energy consumption and link maintenance cost. Unfortunately, most of clustering protocols have been designed for uniformly distributed sensor networks. However, some urgent situations do not allow thousands of sensor nodes being deployed uniformly. For example, air vehicles or balloons may take the responsibility for deploying sensor nodes hence leading a normally distributed topology. In order to improve energy efficiency in such sensor networks, in this paper, we propose a new cluster formation algorithm named DAEEC (Density Aware Energy-Efficient Clustering). In this algorithm, we define two kinds of clusters: Low Density (LD) clusters and High Density (HD) clusters. They are determined by the number of nodes participated in one cluster. During the data routing period, the HD clusters help the neighbor LD clusters to forward the sensed data to the central base station. Thus, DAEEC can distribute the energy dissipation evenly among all sensor nodes by considering the deployment density to improve network lifetime and average energy savings. Moreover, because the HD clusters are densely deployed they can work in a manner of our former algorithm EEVAR (Energy Efficient Variable Area Routing Protocol) to save energy. According to the performance analysis result, DAEEC outperforms the conventional data routing schemes in terms of energy consumption and network lifetime.