Using adaptive clustering scheme with load balancing to enhance energy efficiency and reliability in delay tolerant with QoS in large-scale mobile wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Purpose

Load balancing is an effective enhancement to the proposed routing protocol, and the basic idea is to share traffic load among cluster members to reduce the dropping probability due to queue overflow at some nodes. This paper aims to propose a novel hierarchical approach called distributed energy efficient adaptive clustering protocol (DEACP) with data gathering, load-balancing and self-adaptation for wireless sensor network (WSN). The authors have proposed DEACP approach to reach the following objectives: reduce the overall network energy consumption, balance the energy consumption among the sensors and extend the lifetime of the network, the clustering must be completely distributed, the clustering should be efficient in complexity of message and time, the cluster-heads should be well-distributed across the network, the load balancing should be done well and the clustered WSN should be fully connected. Simulations show that DEACP clusters have good performance characteristics.

Design/methodology/approach

A WSN consists of large number of wireless capable sensor devices working collaboratively to achieve a common objective. One or more sinks [or base stations (BS)] which collect data from all sensor devices. These sinks are the interface through which the WSN interacts with the outside world. Challenges in WSN arise in implementation of several services, and there are so many controllable and uncontrollable parameters (Chirihane, 2015) by which the implementation of WSN is affected, e.g. energy conservation. Clustering is an efficient way to reduce energy consumption and extend the life time of the network, by performing data aggregation and fusion to reduce the number of transmitted messages to the BS (Chirihane, 2015). Nodes of the network are organized into the clusters to process and forwarding the information, while lower energy nodes can be used to sense the target, and DEACP makes no assumptions on the size and the density of the network. The number of levels depends on the cluster range and the minimum energy path to the head. The proposed protocol reduces the number of dead nodes and the energy consumption, to extend the network lifetime. The rest of the paper is organized as follows: An overview of related work is given in Section 2. In Section 3, the authors propose an energy efficient level-based clustering routing protocol (DEACP). Simulations and results of experiments are discussed in Section 4. In Section 5, the authors conclude the work presented in this paper and the scope of further extension of this work.

Originality/value

The authors have proposed the DEACP approach to reach the following objectives: reduce the overall network energy consumption, balance the energy consumption among the sensors and extend the lifetime of the network, the clustering must be completely distributed, the clustering should be efficient in complexity of message and time, the cluster-heads should be well-distributed across the network, the load balancing should be done well, the clustered WSN should be fully connected. Simulations show that DEACP clusters have good performance characteristics.

Citation

Gherbi, C., Aliouat, Z. and Benmohammed, M. (2016), "Using adaptive clustering scheme with load balancing to enhance energy efficiency and reliability in delay tolerant with QoS in large-scale mobile wireless sensor networks", International Journal of Pervasive Computing and Communications, Vol. 12 No. 3, pp. 352-374. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJPCC-10-2015-0035