An Energy-Efficient Hybrid Clustering Mechanism for Wireless Sensor Network

Valuable energy resources of sensor network should be utilized wisely to prolong network's lifetime. Clustering technique helps wireless sensor network (WSN) to enhance its lifetime by reducing energy consumption on every individual sensor node in the network. In multi-hop data forwarding model, difference in energy consumption among cluster heads (HS) causes hot-spot problem in the network. While data is being transferred, the CH close to base station are burdened with heavy relay traffic from several data routes and tend to die early. Unequal clustering avoids this hot-spot problem by establishing different sized clusters at various levels in the network. Since unequal clustering technique does not control number of CHs it creates, it forms huge number of clusters in the network. This increases hop count between source and destination, and leads to impose more over head on each data forwarding route in the network. Also, rapid variation in cluster size causes imbalance in energy dissipation among clustered nodes in the network. This uneven energy consumption influences network performance and lifetime. In this paper, we present an energy-efficient hybrid clustering mechanism for wireless sensor network using equal and unequal clustering techniques to create limited number of clusters in varied sizes at various level of the network. This avoids hot-spot problem with minimum hop count between the source and destination and achieves uniform energy dissipation between intra- and inter-cluster communication. Simulation results show that the proposed clustering mechanism balances the energy consumption among clusters with its hybrid cluster formation mechanism and elevates sensor network lifetime.