Performance Analysis of Energy Efficient Clustering Schemes for Wsn

Clustering enables energy constrained wireless sensor networks to consume less battery power for routing the data packets. In order to achieve the key goal of prolonging the lifetime of sensor nodes besides avoiding undesired frequent topological changes, support from clustering mechanism is much appreciable. While proposing clustering mechanisms, attention is needed the way by which the sensor nodes are deployed over the field of interest. The energy consumed by cluster heads of various clusters to collect and aggregate the sensed data from the non-CH members should be balanced over the network to the possible extent. This can not only overcome faster energy depletion of a certain number of cluster heads and improve the performance of wireless sensor networks. Instead of random selection of cluster heads, it is essential to consider the current status of nodes after each round of data transfer to assign the role of cluster heads. The key factor considered for this is the residual energy of sensor nodes. Besides this approach, uniform sensor node deployment is achievable through grid based clustering techniques. This paper is an attempt to analyze the energy efficiency perspectives of a link quality cum residual energy based clustering mechanism and a virtual-grid based clustering mechanism for efficient routing in energy constrained wireless sensor networks.