Priority Encoding-Based Cluster Head Selection Approach in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks have gotten significant attention in recent times due to their applicability in diverse fields. Energy conservation is a major challenge in wireless sensor networks. Apart from energy conservation, monitoring quality of the environmental phenomenon is also considered a major issue. The approaches that addressed both these problems are of great significance. One such approach is node scheduling, which aims to divide the node set into a number of subsets such that each subset can monitor a given set of points known as targets. The chapter proposes a priority coding-based cluster head selection approach as an extension of the energy efficient coverage protocol (EECP). The priority of the nodes is determined on the basis of residual energy (RE), distance (D), noise factor (N), node degree (Nd), and link quality (LQ). The analytical results show that the proposed protocol improves the network performance by reducing the overhead by a factor of 70% and hence reduces the energy consumption by a factor of 70%.