A stable energy efficient clustering protocol for wireless sensor networks

Sensor networks comprise of sensor nodes with limited battery power that are deployed at different geographical locations to monitor physical events. Information gathering is a typical but an important operation in many applications of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). It is necessary to operate the sensor network for longer period of time in an energy efficient manner for gathering information. One of the popular WSN protocol, named low energy adaptive clustering hierarchy (LEACH) and its variants, aim to prolong the network lifetime using energy efficient clustering approach. These protocols increase the network lifetime at the expense of reduced stability period (the time span before the first node dies). The reduction in stability period is because of the high energy variance of nodes. Stability period is an essential aspect to preserve coverage properties of the network. Higher is the stability period, more reliable is the network. Higher energy variance of nodes leads to load unbalancing among nodes and therefore lowers the stability period. Hence, it is perpetually attractive to design clustering algorithms that provides higher stability, lower energy variance and are energy efficient. In this paper to overcome the shortcomings of existing clustering protocols, a protocol named stable energy efficient clustering protocol is proposed. It balances the load among nodes using energy-aware heuristics and hence ensures higher stability period. The results demonstrate that the proposed protocol significantly outperforms LEACH and its variants in terms of energy variance and stability period.