EBONC: A New Energy-Aware Clustering Approach Based on Optimum Number of Clusters for Mobile Wireless Sensor Networks

The energy constraint is one of the key challenges in wireless sensor networks that directly affects the network lifetime. Clustering the sensor nodes is one of the possible approaches to improving the energy efficiency by uniformly distributing the energy consumption among the nodes. The number of appropriate clusters plays an important role in the network throughput. A Large number of clusters imply that packets pass more hops to reach the destination, which results in higher energy consumption. In this paper, we devise an energy and location aware clustering scheme that tries to optimize the number of required clusters. Moreover, the cluster heads are chosen according to their energy levels. The devised scheme partitions the network into concentric circles and calculates the appropriate number of clusters to provide an energy efficient network. A gossiping approach is used to provide information exchange mechanism. The performance of the devised approach is compared with ASH scheme. The simulation results show the network lifetime is improved from 25% to 40% in difference network scenarios.