Energy Efficient and Safe Weighted Clustering Algorithm for Mobile Wireless Sensor Networks

The main concern of clustering approaches for mobile wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is to prolong the battery life of the individual sensors and the network lifetime. For a successful clustering approach the need of a powerful mechanism to safely elect a cluster-head remains a challenging task in many research works that take into account the mobility of the network. The approach based on the computing of the weight of each node in the network is one of the proposed techniques to deal with this problem. In this paper, we propose an energy efficient and safe weighted clustering algorithm (ES-WCA) for mobile WSNs using a combination of five metrics. Among these metrics lie the behavioral level metric which promotes a safe choice of a cluster head in the sense where this last one will never be a malicious node. We use simulation study to demonstrate the performance of the proposed algorithm. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V.