Clustering objectives in wireless sensor networks: A survey and research direction analysis

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) typically include thousands of resource-constrained sensors to monitor their surroundings, collect data, and transfer it to remote servers for further processing. Although WSNs are considered highly flexible ad-hoc networks, network management has been a fundamental challenge in these types of net- works given the deployment size and the associated quality concerns such as resource management, scalability, and reliability. Topology management is considered a viable technique to address these concerns. Clustering is the most well-known topology management method in WSNs, grouping nodes to manage them and/or executing various tasks in a distributed manner, such as resource management. Although clustering techniques are mainly known to improve energy consumption, there are various quality-driven objectives that can be realized through clustering. In this paper, we review comprehensively existing WSN clustering techniques, their objectives and the network properties supported by those techniques. After refining more than 500 clustering techniques, we extract about 215 of them as the most important ones, which we further review, catergorize and classify based on clustering objectives and also the network properties such as mobility and heterogeneity. In addition, statistics are provided based on the chosen metrics, providing highly useful insights into the design of clustering techniques in WSNs.publishedVersio

Novel Clustering Techniques in Wireless Sensor Networks – A Survey

A study of Wireless Sensor Networks has been growing tremendously these days. Wireless Sensor Networks play a major role in various fields ranging from smart homes to health care. WSN’s operate independently in remote places. Because of tiny size of the nodes in such type of networks, they have a limited number of resources in terms of energy and power. Basically, sensor networks can be classified into flat and cluster based Wireless Sensor Networks. But, Clustering based Sensor Networks play a major role in reducing the energy consumption in Wireless Sensor Networks. Clustering also focuses on solving the No.s that arise during transmission of data. Clustering will group nodes into clusters and elects Cluster Heads for all clusters in the network. Then the nodes sense data and send that data to cluster head where the aggregation of data will take place. This paper focuses on various novel clustering techniques that improve the network’s lifetime

A Survey and Future Directions on Clustering: From WSNs to IoT and Modern Networking Paradigms

Many Internet of Things (IoT) networks are created as an overlay over traditional ad-hoc networks such as Zigbee. Moreover, IoT networks can resemble ad-hoc networks over networks that support device-to-device (D2D) communication, e.g., D2D-enabled cellular networks and WiFi-Direct. In these ad-hoc types of IoT networks, efficient topology management is a crucial requirement, and in particular in massive scale deployments. Traditionally, clustering has been recognized as a common approach for topology management in ad-hoc networks, e.g., in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Topology management in WSNs and ad-hoc IoT networks has many design commonalities as both need to transfer data to the destination hop by hop. Thus, WSN clustering techniques can presumably be applied for topology management in ad-hoc IoT networks. This requires a comprehensive study on WSN clustering techniques and investigating their applicability to ad-hoc IoT networks. In this article, we conduct a survey of this field based on the objectives for clustering, such as reducing energy consumption and load balancing, as well as the network properties relevant for efficient clustering in IoT, such as network heterogeneity and mobility. Beyond that, we investigate the advantages and challenges of clustering when IoT is integrated with modern computing and communication technologies such as Blockchain, Fog/Edge computing, and 5G. This survey provides useful insights into research on IoT clustering, allows broader understanding of its design challenges for IoT networks, and sheds light on its future applications in modern technologies integrated with IoT.acceptedVersio

An Energy Aware Unequal Clustering Algorithm using Fuzzy Logic for Wireless Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks, clustering provides an effective way of organising the sensor nodes to achieve load balancing and increasing the lifetime of the network. Unequal clustering is an extension of common clustering that exhibits even better load balancing. Most existing approaches do not consider node density when clustering, which can pose significant problems. In this paper, a fuzzy-logic based cluster head selection approach is proposed, which considers the residual energy, centrality and density of the nodes. In addition, a fuzzy-logic based clustering range assignment approach is used, which considers the suitability and the position of the nodes in assigning the clustering range. Furthermore, a weight function is used to optimize the selection of the relay nodes. The proposed approach was compared with a number of well known approaches by simulation. The results showed that the proposed approach performs better than the other algorithms in terms of lifetime and other metrics