Distributed algorithms for energy-efficient cluster-head election in wireless mobile sensor networks

The cluster-hased architecture is an effective way to achieve the objective of energy efficiency in wireless sensor networks. One of the critical issues in wireless sensor networks is data-gathering. In this paper, we consider the cluster-based protocol for data-gathering and explore how to elect the cluster-heads with node mobility. Two efficient distributed algorithms for cluster-head election in terms of energy consumption are provided. The proposed algorithms will make each round have the same number of cluster-heads (except the final rounds) and guarantee that each round has at least one cluster-head elected. Two mobility models, Random Walk Mobility model and Random Direction Mobility model, are considered in this paper for node mobility. Last, we implement the algorithms and perform the experiments for evaluation. The experiment results show that our cluster-head election algorithms both outperform the cluster-head election strategy used in LEACH and can make the system live longer.