Compartmental Modeling of Opportunistic Signals for Energy Efficient Optimal Clustering in WSN

This letter proposes the compartmental model-based cluster size optimization using opportunistic signals in wireless sensor networks. The opportunistic signals, namely, Wi-Fi, acoustic, and/or visible light, can be utilized depending upon good availability of the signals in the given area of interest. The compartmental model, which is an attenuation model, describes the variation of opportunistic signal power with propagation distance. In order to minimize the energy consumption, the optimal number of clusters is computed for different orders of the Taylor series expansion of the compartmental model. We illustrate that the second-order Taylor series expansion approximates well enough the exact performance of the compartmental model. A theoretical analysis of the compartmental model performance has been conducted with parameters derived from experimental measurements.