A node density-based approach for energy-efficient data gathering protocol in wireless sensor network environments

Network lifetime is one of the main issues of wireless sensor network (WS-N) development since sensor nodes are usually powered by a battery with limited energy. This characteristic has highlighted the importance of energy-efficient protocol to minimize energy consumption during data-gathering operations in WSN environments. The cluster-based protocol is an effective way to reduce long-distance transmissions and preserve energy by partitioning WSN into some clusters. In this approach, only selected cluster head (CH) nodes will perform data gathering from the cluster node members and transmit the aggregated data to the base station (BS). In this paper, a new approach to build clusters for WSN based on sensor nodes density is proposed. This approach includes the mechanisms to estimate the optimal number of clusters, to select and rotate CH nodes and the algorithm to perform data communications among sensor nodes, CH nodes, and the base station. The proposed approach shows better performance in terms of network lifetime, energy consumption in comparison to the other two well-known WSN communication protocols in data gathering scenarios.