Performance Evaluation of Load-Balanced Clustering of Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks have received increasing attention in the recent few years. In many military and civil applications of sensor networks, sensors are constrained in onboard energy supply and are left unattended. Energy, size and cost constraints of such sensors limit their communication range. Therefore, they require multi-hop wireless connectivity to forward data on their behalf to a remote command site. In this paper we investigate the performance of an algorithm to network these sensors in to well define clusters with lessenergy-constrained gateway nodes acting as clusterheads, and balance load among these gateways. Load balanced clustering increases the system stability and improves the communication between different nodes in the system. To evaluate the efficiency of our approach we have studied the performance of sensor networks applying various different routing protocols. Simulation results shows that irrespective of the routing protocol used, our approach improves the lifetime of the system.