An energy-saving routing architecture with a uniform clustering algorithm for wireless body sensor networks

Wireless body sensor networks are expected to extend human-centered applications in large-scale sensing and detecting environments. Energy savings has become one of the most important features of the sensor nodes to prolong their lifetime in such networks. To provide reasonable energy consumption and to improve the network lifetime of wireless body sensor network systems, new and efficient energy-saving schemes must be developed. An energy-saving routing architecture with a uniform clustering algorithm is proposed in this paper to reduce the energy consumption in wireless body sensor networks. We adopted centralized and cluster-based techniques to create a cluster-tree routing structure for the sensor nodes. The main goal of this scheme is to reduce the data transmission distances of the sensor nodes by using the uniform cluster structure concepts. To make an ideal cluster distribution, the distances between the sensor nodes are calculated, and the residual energy of each sensor node is accounted for when selecting the appropriate cluster head nodes. On the basis of the uniform cluster location, the data transmission distances between the sensor nodes can be reduced by employing an adaptive multi-hop approach. The energy consumption is reduced, and the lifetime is extended for the sensor nodes by balancing the network load among the clusters. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme outperforms the previously known schemes in terms of the energy consumption and the network lifetime for the wireless body sensor networks. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.