A Survey of Adaptive Distributed Clustering Algorithms for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), is one of the most rapidly growing scientific domain. This is because of the development of advanced sensor nodes with extremely low cost and the potential applications of such sensor nodes are ever growing. WSNs are web of sensor nodes with a set of processors and limited memory unit embedded in it. Reliable routing of packets from sensor nodes to its base station is the most important task for these networks. Routing in WSN is bit more complex than other wired or wireless networks. The conventional routing protocols cannot be used here due to its battery powered nodes. To support scalability, energy efficiency and efficient routing, nodes are often grouped in to non-overlapping clusters. This paper gives a crisp introduction on clustering process in WSNs. The survey of different distributed clustering algorithms (adaptive clustering algorithms) used in WSNs, based on some metrics such as cluster count, cluster stability, cluster head mobility, cluster head role, clustering objective and cluster head selection is done. The study concludes with comparison of few distributed clustering algorithms in WSNs based on these metrics.