A power-mitigating scheme for clusterheads inwireless sensor networks

In a clustered Wireless Sensor Network (WSN), the nodes designated as clusterheads (CH) very likely will consume particularly large amount of power. This is because a CH is involved in "everything" taking place in the cluster, from in-cluster data collection, pre-processing, inter-cluster communication, to cluster administration. In this paper we investigate feasible ways of lessening the power consumption of CHs. The method we propose is to distribute the task of data collection to some non-CH nodes in the cluster. We introduce the notion of partaker nodes. The partakers' role in a cluster is to assist the CH in the routine job of data collection. Instead of having CH alone collect data from all sensors in the cluster, a certain number of partaker nodes participate in data collection. They will help collect the raw data, and perform initial data aggregation/processing before transferring data to the CH.With partakers, a portion of power that would have been consumed by CHs is transferred to partakers. The power consumption of CHs can be reduced to various extents depending on the number, as well as the placement, of partakers.