SEECH: Scalable Energy Efficient Clustering Hierarchy Protocol in Wireless Sensor Networks

The energy efficiency is an important issue for employ distributed wireless sensor networks in smart space and extreme environments. The cluster-based communication protocols play a considerable role for energy saving in hierarchical wireless sensor networks. In most of traditional clustering algorithms, a cluster head (CH) simultaneously serves as a relay sensor node to transmit its cluster/other clusters data packet(s) to the data sink. As a result, each node would have CH role as many as relay role during network lifetime. In our view, this is inefficient from an energy efficiency perspective because in lots of cases, a node due to its position in the network comparatively is more proper to work as a CH and/a relay. This paper proposes a new distributed algorithm named scalable energy efficient clustering hierarchy (SEECH), which selects CHs and relays separately and based on nodes eligibilities. In this way, high and low degree nodes are, respectively, employed as CHs and relays. In only a few past researches, CHs and relays are different, but their goal was mainly mitigation of CHs energy burden which is intrinsically satisfied by the proposed mechanism. To consider uniformity of CHs to balance clusters, SEECH uses a new distance-based algorithm. Comparisons with LEACH and TCAC protocols show obvious better performance of SEECH in term of lifetime. To evaluate the scalability of SEECH strategy, simulations are conducted in three different network size scenarios.