Home // International Journal On Advances in Networks and Services, volume 6, numbers 3 and 4, 2013 // View article

Fault-Tolerant and Energy-Efficient Generic Clustering Protocol for Heterogeneous WSNs

Authors:
Mandicou Ba
Olivier Flauzac
Rafik Makhloufi
Florent Nolot
Ibrahima Niang

Keywords: Self-stabilizing clustering; Wireless Sensor Networks; Energy-aware; Fault-tolerant; OMNeT++ simulator;

Abstract:
In the context of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), where sensors have limited energy power, it is necessary to carefully manage this scarce resource by saving communications. Clustering is considered as an effective scheme to increase the scalability and lifetime of wireless sensor networks. Moreover, failures and topological changes are inevitable in sensor networks due to the inhospitable environment, unattended deployment or nodes mobility. Therefore, one of the wanted properties of WSNs is the fault tolerance and adaptivity to topological changes. We propose a fault-tolerant and energy-efficient distributed self-stabilizing clustering protocol based on message-passing for heterogeneous wireless sensor networks. This protocol is adapted to topological changes, optimizes energy consumption and prolongs the network lifetime by minimizing the number of messages involved in the construction of clusters. Our generic clustering protocol can be easily used for constructing clusters according to multiple criteria in the election of cluster-heads, such as nodes' identity, residual energy or degree. We propose to validate our approach under the different election metrics by evaluating its communication cost in terms of messages, energy consumption and number of clusters. Simulation results show that, in terms of of messages, energy consumption and clusters distribution, it is better to use the Highest-ID metric for electing CHs. Furthermore, after faults occurrence, the re-clustering cost is minimal compared to the clustering cost.

Pages: 231 to 245

Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2013. Used with permission.

Publication date: December 31, 2013

Published in: journal

ISSN: 1942-2644