Reliable and energy efficient backup clustering scheme for wireless sensor networks

One of the major challenges in wireless sensor networks (WSN) is to meet the energy constraint of its sensor nodes while ensuring reliability of the system. Clustering is an effective self-organization approach to offer energy-efficient communication for WSNs. However, energy of a sensor node dynamically decreases when it plays a role of a cluster head. As a result some nodes die faster that shorten overall network lifetime and reduce reliability. Existing clustering techniques even with backup cluster head (BCH) consumes huge energy due to frequent re-clustering and inefficient backup cluster head selection and switching. In this paper we propose a new approach for backup cluster head scheme to reduce the frequency of re-clustering and thus to increase the network lifetime. We introduce the selection of an optimal set of backup cluster heads from the cluster member nodes and the calculation of their optimum switching time. To evaluate the efficacy of the proposed scheme we extend the HEED clustering protocol to backup cluster head. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed approach is effective in prolonging the network lifetime that outperforms both HEED and backup clustering proposed in [10] considerably. Proposed scheme also enhances data reliability by reducing re-clustering overhead.