A power- and coverage-aware clustering scheme for wireless sensor networks

A common and critical operation for wireless sensor networks is data gathering. The efficient clustering of a sensor network that can save energy and improve coverage efficiency is an important requirement for many upper layer network functions. This study concentrates on how to form clusters with high uniformity while prolonging the network lifetime. A novel clustering scheme named power- and coverage- aware clustering (PCC) is proposed, which can adaptively select cluster heads according to a hybrid of the nodes' residual energy and loyalty degree. Additionally, the PCC scheme is independent of node distribution or density, and it is free of node hardware limitations, such as self-locating capability and time synchronization. Experiment results show that the scheme performs well in terms of cluster size (and its standard deviation), number of nodes alive over time, total energy consumption, etc.