Dynamic Hierarchical Communication Paradigm for Wireless Sensor Networks: A Centralized, Energy Efficient Approach

Abstract

A Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) consists of a large number of randomly deployed sensor nodes. These sensor nodes organize themselves into a cooperative network and perform the three basic functions of sens-ing, computations and communications. Research in WSNs has become an extensive explorative area during the last few years, especially due the challenges offered, energy constraints of the sensors being one of them. In this paper, the need for effective utilization of limited power resources is emphasized, which becomes pre-eminent to the Wireless Sensor Networks. Organizing the network to achieve balanced clusters based on assigning equal number of sensors to each cluster may have the consequence of unbalanced load on the clus-ter heads. This results in an unbalanced consumption of energy by the nodes, cumulatively leading to mini-mization of network lifetime. In this paper, we put forth a Sink administered Load balanced Dynamic Hier-archical Protocol (SLDHP) to balance the load on the principal nodes. Hierarchical layout of the sensors en-dows the network with considerable minimization of energy consumption of nodes leading to an increased lifespan. Simulation results indicate significant improvement of performance over Base station Controlled Dynamic Clustering Protocol (BCDCP).