CIAC: Cluster Head Induced Affinity based Clustering for Prolonging the Lifetime of Wireless Sensor Network

A WSN is composed of a few hundreds to thousands of spatially distributed autonomous sensor nodes. This large-scale deployment of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and the need for data aggregation necessitate efficient organization of the network topology for the purpose of balancing the load and prolonging the network lifetime. One of the prior issues in WSNs is how to save the energy consumption for prolonging the network lifetime. Clustering has proven to be an effective approach for organizing the network into a connected hierarchy. The communication or message passing process must be designed to conserve the limited energy resources of the sensors. Sensors are clustered into groups, so that sensors from a cluster communicate information only to cluster heads and then the cluster heads communicate the aggregated information to the processing centre which may save energy. For this purpose, many intelligent innovative techniques are required to improve the energy efficiency and lifetime of the network. In this paper, a new Cluster head Induced Affinity based Clustering (CIAC) algorithm has been proposed that can organize the sensors in a wireless sensor network into clusters through randomized selection of cluster heads and based on the affinity factor of each sensor node induced by the selected cluster head different clusters are formed. The performance of the proposed system is evaluated in terms of energy efficiency and reliability.