A Distributed Energy-efficient Clustering Algorithm based on Weighted Probability for Wireless Sensor Networks

Clustering problem is one of the significant issues for wireless sensor networks concerned with energy consumption and large-scale deployment. Several energy-efficient clustering algorithms have been proposed to improve the energy utilization efficiency and prolong the network lifetime. In this paper, we propose a new clustering scheme after a comprehensive analysis on existing protocols. In our algorithm, named WPCA (Weighted Probabilistic Clustering Algorithm), every node independently decides whether to be a cluster head according to a weighted probability, which is related to the ratio between node’s residual energy and average remaining energy. The nodes with more residual energy are assigned larger weight value to further increase the chances to be elected as cluster heads. In addition, the rotation procedure of cluster heads in previous algorithms is totally abandoned. Simulation results show that WPCA achieves longer lifetime than previous probabilisticbased clustering algorithms and gets a very close approximation compared with a deterministic clustering method.