A Hybrid Relative Distance Based Cluster Scheme for Energy Efficiency in Wireless Sensor Networks

Energy efficiency is of great importance for the wireless sensor network (WSN). A popular way to save energy is to construct clusters for data aggregation and forwarding. This paper studies the distributed cluster algorithm to improve the energy consumption efficiency. We observe that the cluster head has to lie within the transmission range of the base station (sink node) and the distance between cluster head and base station is critical for the energy consumption performance, we propose a hybrid relative distance based clustering scheme (HRDCS), which considers the relative distance to the base station and the residual energy level during the cluster head selection stage. Consequently we could better balance the chance of being cluster head for all nodes. Simulation results show that our scheme is able to result in longer network lifetime than the well-known protocol LEACH [2].