Clustering in WSN with latency and energy consumption constraints

Sensor networks have emerged as a revolutionary technology for querying the physical world and hold promise in a wide variety of applications. However, the extremely energy constrained nature of these networks necessitate that their architecture be designed in an energy-aware manner. Clustering is the architecture of choice as it keeps the traffic local; sensor nodes would send only to nearby cluster-head within a fixed radius, independent of the network size. In this paper we address the problem of clustering in WSNs, subject to upper bounds on the maximum latency, the energy consumed by intermediate nodes, and clusters size. Those constraints are necessary for the reliability of the system and for extending its lifetime. We propose a polynomial time algorithm consisting of recursively computing minimum weighted dominating sets, while respecting latency and energy consumption constraints. We compare our algorithm to other alternatives and show that it consistently outperforms them,