Energy Efficient Clustering Techniques for Wireless Sensor Networks-A Review

The applications of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are growing at rapid pace and providing pervasive computing environments. Energy constraints is the most critical issue in sensor applications and that needs be optimized to prolong the life of resource constrained sensor network. Clustering is an efficient technique to group the sensor nodes of entire network into number of clusters to support high scal ability and provide better data aggregation by efficient utilization of limited resources of sensor nodes and that prolongs network lifetime.

In this paper, some widely explored clustering algorithms in WSNs are discussed on several aspects and characteristics such as clustering timings, clustering attributes, convergence rate etc. The advantages and disadvantages of corresponding clustering algorithms are also explained with suitable examples. The paper finally concludes with discussion on the challenges of clustering in WSNs with mentioning the future research topics