ERoS: Role Sharing for Improved Energy Efficiency in Cluster-Based Wireless Sensor Networks

We propose ERoS, an energy-efficient protocol that greatly improves the lifetime of cluster-based wireless sensor networks. The central idea in ERoS is to restrict the cluster head to cluster management, and offload aggregation and transmission functions from the cluster head to other appropriately chosen nodes. Cluster heads are self-selected randomly in ERoS, using a single probability parameter, so that clusters are formed autonomously and in a distributed manner. Cluster distribution is uniform in ERoS since we use a crowding distance check to ensure that clusters are sufficiently spaced apart. Energy consumption is uniform in ERoS, since it distributes energy-intensive roles across several nodes, and rotates clusters (and roles) across nodes in the network. We present analytical and simulation results comparing ERoS with other protocols, and show that it outperforms competing methods.