Edinburgh Napier University

  Although energy efficiency in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) has been investigated widely, it is still a challenging dilemma. Clustering mechanisms are among the most widely recommended approaches to sustaining a network throughout its lifetime. Despite a number of research activities associated with clustering in WSNs, some aspects of clustering have not yet been adequately investigated. The election of Cluster Head (CH) nodes is the key element in most clustering algorithms. The majority of the elected CHs in previous algorithms use a single metric as their principal criteria, such as remaining energy, distance to the base station (BS), and random probability. Unlike existing solutions, this paper proposes a new weighting based approach to electing CHs, considering the node's context; i.e. its transmission range, its degree, remaining energy and centrality from its neighbours. The novelty of our algorithm relates to the selection of a set of nodes with the highest weight as CH candidates, in order to compete for final CH. This will guarantee the selection of optimal cluster heads among sensor nodes. Moreover, this novel approach eliminates the re-clustering process for the entire network in each round, by rotating the CHs inside the created clusters in the first set up phase. The simulation experiments demonstrate that the new approach outperforms its counterparts (HEED, LCP and EEUC) with respect to the network's lifetime.