An efficient design of cluster size for maximizing outcomes of direct transmission in cluster-based wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Due to their vast prospective applications, researchers pay a great attention to Wireless Sensors Networks (WSNs) in the recent years. One of the most constraints related to sensor nodes is the small sized and portable battery integrated into the node itself. From the practical and economical point of view, it is risky, inefficient and infeasible option to recharge these batteries by human periodically. In this paper, we primarily focus on optimizing the transmission energy for each node; hence the energy utilization over the whole network is enhanced. In fact, the transmission energy increases exponentially with distance, hence Direct Transmission (DT) isn't preferred for far distances, therefore Multi-hop is more efficient. In this paper, it's assumed that there is always threshold distance, called characteristic distance dcharwhich used as a judging metric to specify whether to use DT or Multi-hop transmission (MH) as an efficient transmission manner. If the distance is greater than dcharMH is used, else DT is preferred. We are interested in studying this distance in more details. This comes through two steps, the first step will be made by analyzing for the relation between the design parameters and the consumed energy of different transmission techniques hence, a general formula fordcharis excluded. In the second step, supplementary analysis will be performed to study the effect of design parameters on dchar. Finally, dcharis suggested to play a pivotal role in specifying the optimum size of the cluster. This minimizes the variance in node residual energy within the cluster.