A survey on clustering approaches for wireless Sensor Networks

Due to the rapid advancement of the Internet of Things (IoT) technology for a wide range of applications, it has become an active research topic among the scientist community. Wireless sensor network (WSN) being the major component of IoT, have also got attraction in recent years. However, WSN being an energy constrained network, designing energy-aware protocol is of vital importance. Clustering in WSN has shown significant energy efficiency by enhancing the network lifetime, conserving energy and bandwidth. But, a clustered WSNs suffers from a major problem called energy hole or hotspot problem. In this problem, nodes in the vicinity of remote station drain out of energy much earlier as compared to its distant counterparts. This makes the remote station unreachable from the network. In this paper, a comprehensive survey of different clustering protocols is presented and analysed by considering different clustering properties.