New Heuristic Methods for Balanced Clustering Problem in Wireless Sensor Networks

One of the important methods used in large scale distributed wireless sensor networks to facilitate the process of data transmission from ordinary nodes to the sink node is to perform hierarchical routing through clustering. With the creation of balanced clusters, the load distribution can be distributed evenly and the network lifetime can be extended. One of the most important clustering methods is the use of dominating sets. In this study, two new heuristic methods have been proposed for the clusterhead assignment problem in dominating sets. The first and second heuristics take into account the nodes' degrees to select dominator nodes and their dominatee nodes, respectively. The proposed methods have been tested on various wireless sensor networks with different setups. According to the obtained results, the proposed heuristics performed approximately 13% and 36% better than the existing studies on average in terms of dominator count and coefficients of variation metrics.