The low-cost Wireless
Sensor Network
(WSN) consists of small battery powered devices called sensors, with limited
energy capacity. Once deployed, accessibility to any sensor node for maintenance and battery replacement is not feasible
due to the spatial scattering of the nodes. This will lead to an unreliable,
limited lifetime and a poor connectivity network. In this paper a novel bio-inspired cluster-based
deployment algorithm is proposed for energy optimization of the WSN
and ultimately to improve the network lifetime. In the cluster initialization
phase, a single
cluster is formed with a single cluster head at the center of the sensing terrain. The
second phase is for optimum cluster formation surrounding
the inner cluster, based on swarming bees and a piping technique. Each cluster member distributes
its data to its corresponding cluster head and the cluster head communicates
with the base station, which reduces the communication distance of each node. The simulation
results show that, when
compared with other clustering algorithms, the proposed algorithm can significantly reduce
the number of clusters by 38% and improve the network lifetime by a factor of
1/4.
