An Optimized Approach to Determine Alternative Cluster Head in Wireless Sensor Network Clustering Structure

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks consist of hundreds or thousands tiny nodes that work together to do some special tasks. Generally, to reduce energy consumption in the network, just some of the nodes send the data to the sink. This structure is called clustering and the nodes linked to the sink are called cluster head. The other nodes send their data to the nearest cluster head. Choosing a node as alternative cluster head can improve the network efficiency because clustering formation is a costly approach. When the cluster head stops working it is necessary to do the clustering formation but when we have alternative for the cluster head no clustering formation is needed, just the alternative introduces itself as the new cluster head and informs the other nodes in the cluster about this matter. In this paper we propose a novel approach to determine alternative node for cluster head. The existing methods impose high overhead on the network and some of them has very low accuracy while the proposed method has high accuracy also imposes almost no overhead to the network by using in-network data and eliminating the array data structure