NEC: Node energy based clustering protocol for wireless sensor networks with guaranteed connectivity

Wireless sensor networks are continually being deployed in various application areas which are posing various new challenges. Yet, one problem that still remains central to the operability and applicability of sensor networks is the limited energy of the sensor nodes which directly limits the network lifetime. Various schemes have been proposed to optimize the energy conservation, some of which use network-redundancy to switch off the radios of some nodes. Ensuring minimum connectivity in such a case is the main objective, which the existing papers address inadequately. We propose a scheme of topology control based on the concept of strong and weak nodes. In our protocol clustering is done keeping in mind the lifetime of all the nodes that are awake and not just the lifetime of the cluster-head hence ensuring that minimum connectivity is always guaranteed.