An Energy-Efficient Dynamic Clustering Protocol for Event Monitoring in Large-Scale WSN

As a key technology, clustering has been an effective way in large-scale wireless sensor networks (WSNs) to extend the lifetime. However, the static cluster structure in most of the traditional method is formed without considering the development of the event. In this paper, we propose an Energy-Efficient Dynamic Clustering (EEDC) protocol for event monitoring applications in large scale WSN. In EEDC, a dynamic clustering method using Rough Fuzzy C-Means and Genetic algorithm (RFCM-GA) is designed. Firstly, the idea of fuzzy set and rough set in RFCM are used to form the overlapping cluster, which can guarantee the quality of coverage of the developing event. Secondly, we use GA to perform a parallel search in each cluster to find the optimal set of candidate cluster heads (CCHs). RFCM-GA can use its powerful global search capabilities and fast convergence speed to obtain the best clustering results. Simulation results demonstrate that EEDC has higher energy efficiency and prolongs the network lifetime compared to the existing approaches.