The Study On Adaptive Clustering Protocol For Medium-Scale Wireless Sensor Network

With the rapid advances in the technology of sensor, wireless communication and computer science, the wireless sensor network has been proposed and developed quickly in the past several years. Wireless sensor network has typical characters as follows: numerous nodes with limited resources, dynamic topology of the network and the various applications, hence the protocols of wireless sensor network should be designed according to these characters. The adaptive clustering algorithm is one of the most popular solutions for the protocols of wireless sensor network. It is developed based on the static clustering method, however the cluster heads are rotating periodically among all nodes to evenly distribute energy loads in the network, and the clustering structure can adapt to the rotation of cluster heads. The development of the adaptive clustering protocols is mostly focus on how to improve the energy efficiency and prolong the network lifetime. However, there is little research on the influence of the application environment on the sensor network which is important for the performance of the protocols.At the beginning of this thesis, we introduce the background of wireless sensor network and give an overview of the existing adaptive clustering protocols. We analyze the relations between the network scale and the communication abilities of sensor nodes, and then point out the problem that the traditional adaptive clustering protocols could only be applied to small-scale wireless sensor network for their enormous broadcasting radius of ADV messages. In order to solve this problem, we propose an adaptive clustering protocol for medium-scale wireless sensor networks (ACPM). ACPM adopts the adaptive back-off algorithm for cluster head selection to achieve its goal. The analysis proves that ACPM reduces the requirement for the communication abilities of the nodes, and hence could be applied to medium-scale wireless sensor networks.We simulate the ACPM protocol and analyze the performance of ACPM including clustering structure, network lifetime and energy efficiency. The simulation results show that ACPM has well-balanced clustering structure with stable number of clusters, ACPM has improvements on the network lifetime and energy efficiency, especially on the medium-scale networks, and the network scale has less influence on the performance of ACPM which means ACPM is suitable for the applications in the medium-scale wireless sensor network.