An Overlapping Clustering Approach For Routing In Wireless Sensor Networks

The research development of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) can be regarded as a bifurcated process, the first one is the work of hardware, researchers had dedicated to minimize the sensor, and then researchers began to pay attention to construct efficient WSNs with sensors. Since the environment sensors are deployed is complicated, the batteries they carried cannot be replaced timely when energy runs out. Therefore, energy consumption becomes a restriction for the popularization of WSNs. Due to sensors’ limited resources, the energy consumption of computing is relatively small compared to the communication part. Most focus of the WSNs’ energy balance research is on how to improve the communication efficiency, and most researchers work on designing an optimal routing strategy to balance the network energy consumption, which helps prolong the network’s lifetime.Due to the above problems, this paper proposed a new scheme, called k-OCHE scheme after an in-depth research of energy balancing in wireless sensor networks, as well as the related work of routing algorithms and the duty-cycle scheme. The k-OCHE scheme adopted the CKN duty-cycle scheme which release the restraint that all sensors must be awake in the former research, thus, sensor nodes can take turns to sleep when assuring the network connectivity. In CKN, a node can turn to sleep when it has k awake neighbors. The&-OCHE scheme partitioned the network into overlapping clusters according to a new metric, i.e., a node’s energy availability (EA). In contrast to former non-overlapping clustering, k-OCHE scheme is useful in many sensor network applications, including inter-cluster routing, node localization, and time synchronization protocols. In the part of simulation, this paper compared the performance of traditional GPSR and&-OCHE scheme based GPSR. The results showed that&-OCHE scheme produced approximately equal-sized clusters, which allows distributing the load evenly over different clusters. The&-OCHE scheme can guarantee an overlapping degree of at least10, which is more than enough for most network applications. Further, k-OCHE scheme based GPSR outperformed traditional GPSR in energy balancing, network lifetime, as well as routing recovery time.