Directed budget-based clustering for wireless sensor networks

Abstract — Wireless Sensor Networks are typically bound to operate autonomously on a field, under severe energy constraints and without any centralized control. It is thus essential to develop self-organization protocols/algorithms which enable the autonomous, distributed and energy efficient network selforganization. Budget-based clustering approaches have recently been proposed for this purpose, by specifying rules for distributing a given budget of tokens to neighbors. In this paper, two strictly localized, budget-based clustering algorithms are proposed: the Directed Budget-Based (DBB) and Directed Budget-Based with Random Delays (DBB-RD). The basic, innovative idea is to utilize clustering status information that can be readily available (e.g. through the HELLO exchanges) to reduce or eliminate token distribution contentions (both intra- and intercluster) that severely limit the effectiveness of earlier budgetbased approaches. Simulation results are presented demonstrating a substantial improvement over the earlier approaches with respect to the achieved clustersizes and time to complete network decomposition. I