ELF HEALING CLUSTER-BASED TOPOLOGY CREATION & MANAGEMENT IN SECURE WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS.PDF

Abstract

Tiny devices known as sensor nodes capable of sensing computing and communicating simultaneously to form a wireless sensor network. WSN has emerged as a revolutionary technology which has brought with it numerous applications. Sensor nodes are placed in the hostile environment to monitor different type activities or changes. Different topologies to create a WSN from these sensor nodes have been proposed. Clustering is a form of topology in which sensor nodes organize themselves in the form of cluster which are common function to all the sensor nodes. It is important to describe an efficient topology discovery algorithm to find a set of distinguished nodes. The main objective of a clustering algorithm is to make the whole network connected in the form of efficient topology. A clustering algorithm organizes the nodes in two phases: set up is the first phase and maintenance of the cluster is the second phase. To optimally choose self healing cluster heads is an NP-hard problem. The research discusses and compares various strategies of self healing cluster formation in wireless sensor networks. Three popular techniques of clustering, namely highest degree, topology discovery and weighted clustering have been implemented. Two new algorithms, named maximal weight and bounded degree have been proposed for the design and implementation of self healing cluster based topology creation and management system. The detailed design and working of maximal weight and bounded degree algorithms are presented with the help of examples. The new proposed algorithms generate self healing clusters based, on minimizing reconfiguration, thus saving energy and optimizing the communication. The algorithms perform better than in comparison with the popular techniques in terms of number of rearrangements i.e. reaffiliations and dominant set updates, number of clusters, stability of clusters, and ratio of clusterheads to number of nodes. A detailed comparitive analysis of the proposed algorithms against the topology discovery and weighted clustering algorithm has been provided. The research work also highlights some open research areas for securing wireless sensor networks.