A Study of Clustering Techniques for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor network (WSN), in recent times, has been exhibiting potential in variety of applications like military surveillance, disaster management, and wildlife monitoring. In these applications, humans cannot access the place either to deploy the sensors or to monitor the sensors as the environment is inhospitable. Therefore, the sensors are expected to be remotely deployed and to operate in an autonomous mode. To support scalability, sensor nodes are formed or organized into clusters and the clusters formed are without overlap and disjoint. In this paper, classification of clustering attributes is presented from the various published clustering algorithms of WSN. The clustering schemes are compared based on the metrics such as sensor mobility, overlap of clusters, position awareness, efficient energy-based, uniform clustering, and stability of cluster.