PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS OF ENERGY EFFICIENT CLUSTERING SCHEME IN HIERARCHICAL WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS

With the advancement in wireless sensor networks ( WSNs) sensors are gaining significance in the physical world. WSNs gained the attention of researchers in many challenging aspects. The most important challenge in these networks is energy conservation. One of the best solutio n in making WSNs energy - efficient is to cluster the networks. In c lustering, the nodes are partitioned into some clusters and then some nodes, ca lled cluster heads, are chosen to be the he ad of each cluster. In a clustered wireless sensor network, the reg ular nodes sense the field and send their sensed information to the cluster head, t hen, after gathering and collec ting the data, the cluster head transmits them to the base station. Clustering the nodes in wireless sensor networks has many advantage s, incl uding scalability, energy efficiency and reducing routing delay. Some of the clustering obje ctives considered in this paper include fault tolerance, increased connectivity, data aggregation and collision avoidance. For simulation, the network simulator tool (NS2) is used. The performance of the proposed scheme has been shown in graphs for the metrics namely, energy consumption, delay and packet delivery ratio .