Clustering in Wireless Sensor Networks

Applications of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) have been expanded from industrial operation to daily common use. With the pace of development, a good number of state-of-the-art routing protocols have been proposed for WSN. Among many of these protocols, hierarchical or cluster-based protocol technique is adopted from the wired network because of its scalability, better manageability, and implicit energy efficiency. In this chapter, the authors have surveyed Low Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy, Power-Efficient Gathering in Sensor Information Systems, Adaptive Periodic Threshold-Sensitive Energy Efficient Sensor Network, and Hybrid Energy-Efficient Distributed Routing Protocols. These protocols exhibit notable characteristics and advantages compared to their contemporaries. Again, context aware computing and applications have been greatly emphasized in recent articles by renowned technologists. This approach is considered as a momentous technology that will change the way of interaction with information devices. Accordingly, context aware clustering technique carries a great deal of importance among WSN routing protocols. Therefore, the authors have investigated noteworthy context aware routing protocols such as: Context Adaptive Clustering, Data-Aware Clustering Hierarchy, Context-Aware Clustering Hierarchy, and Context-Aware Multilayer Hierarchical Protocol. Their investigation and analysis of these protocols has been included in this chapter with useful remarks. Context awareness is considered an integral part of Body Sensor Networks (BSN), which is one kind of WSN. Thus, the authors have also discussed issues related to context aware techniques used in BSN.