Clustering is a very popular network structuring technique which mainly addresses the issue of scalability in large scale Wireless Sensor Networks. Additionally, it has been shown to improve the energy efficiency and prolong the life of the network. The suggested protocols mostly base their clustering criteria on some grouping attribute(s) of the nodes. One important attribute that is largely ignored by most of the existing multi-hop clustering protocols is the reliability of the communication links between the nodes. In this paper, we suggest an adaptive and completely distributed multi-hop clustering protocol that incorporates different notions of reliability of the communication links, among other things, into a composite metric and uses it in all phases of the clustering process. The joining criteria for the nodes, which lie at one hop from the elected cluster heads, to a particular cluster not only consider the reliability of their communication link with their cluster head but a...
Khalid Nawaz, Alejandro P. Buchmann