A Self-Organized Head Selection for Hierarchical Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks

Efficient energy consumption is critical for deployment and operation of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). There have been several suggestions using a hierarchical approach that organizes sensor nodes into clusters and uses one node as a cluster head to forward message received from its cluster member nodes to the base station of WSN. Efficient head selection is a major issue for the cluster-based hierarchical routing protocols. We propose a self-organized algorithms for cluster head selection and cluster-based routing. To decide cluster heads and organize cluster members, each sensor node uses only local information and simple rules which are inspired by nature. By these self-organized interactions among sensor nodes, the suggested rnethod can form clusters for a WSN and decide routing paths efficiently. We compare our algorithms with two known routing protocols which are based on random head selections and transmitter-based code assignment schemes. In our computational experiments, we show that the energy consumption and the lifetime of our algorithm are better than those of the compared protocols.