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BEACH: Balanced Energy and Adaptive Cluster Head Selection Algorithm for Wireless Sensor Networks
Koppala Guravaiah and R. Leela Velusamy
In wireless sensor networks, clustering mechanism is one of the most suitable techniques to build energy efficient protocol and it provides many benefits such as scalability, energy efficiency, network lifetime, etc. However, most of the clustering mechanisms are constructing clusters of unequal size (in terms of number of members) due to improper cluster head selection. Unequal sized clusters lead to imbalanced energy consumption among clusters. In this paper, a weight based cluster head selection technique BEACH: Balanced Energy and Adaptive Cluster Head Selection is introduced to construct equal sized (approximately) clusters in the network. In addition, river formation dynamics based multi-hop communication is introduced between cluster heads and base station. The proposed method is experimented in both homogenous and heterogeneous environments. The experimental results were compared with existing protocols such as ERA and ACH2. The comparison reveals that the proposed algorithm performs better than the existing protocols with respect to energy conservation and network lifetime.
Keywords: Wireless Sensor Networks, Routing Protocols, Cluster, Data Collection, Energy Efficiency, Network Lifetime, River Formation Dynamics