An Energy Efficient Multi-hop Cluster-Head Election Strategy for Wireless Sensor Networks

According to the double-phase cluster-head election method (DCE), the final cluster heads (CHs) sometimes are located at the edge of cluster. They have a long distance from the base station (BS). Sensor data is directly transmitted to BS by CHs. This makes some nodes consume much energy for transmitting data and die earlier. To address this problem, energy efficient multi-hop cluster-head election strategy (EEMCE) is proposed in this paper. To avoid taking these nodes far from BS as CH, this strategy first introduces the distance from the sensor nodes to the BS into the tentative CH election. Subsequently, in the same cluster, the energy of tentative CH is compared with those of other nodes, and then the node that has more energy than the tentative CH and being nearest the tentative CH are taken as the final CH. Lastly, if the CH is located at the periphery of the network, the multi-hop method will be employed to reduce the energy that is consumed by CHs. The simulation results suggest that the proposed method exhibits higher energy efficiency, longer stability period and better scalability than other protocols.