An energy-aware routing protocol for wireless sensor networks based on k-means clustering

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have recently gained much attention from researchers due to their large potential for practical applications. One of the most critical problems in WSN research is to prolong the network lifetime, given that sensor nodes are only equipped with energy-limited batteries. Clustering sensor nodes and then routing the transmission of data to the base station via cluster heads (CHs) is an effective approach to this problem. In this paper, we first analyze the problem of selecting cluster centers as CHs which may quickly exhaust their energy. Then we propose a new k-means-based routing (KMR) protocol, where the selection of CHs is randomized so as to better distribute the transmission load among sensor nodes of the same cluster. The simulation results on OMNeT++ show that our method KMR can make a substantial improvement in the network lifetime compared with some existing methods, including LEACH (Low-Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy). © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014.