Hossein Fotouhi Ghazvini - Department of Computer and Communication Networks, Faculty of Engineering, University of Putra Malaysia, Selangor, Malaysia
Maryam Vahabi - Department of Computer and Communication Networks, Faculty of Engineering, University of Putra Malaysia, Selangor, Malaysia

A wireless network consisting of a large number of small sensors with low-power transceivers can be an effective tool for gathering data in a variety of environments. The data collected by each sensor is communicated through the network to a single processing center that uses all reported data to determine characteristics of the environment or detect an event. The communication or message passing process must be designed to conserve the limited energy resources of the sensors. This paper derives an algorithm for minimizing energy consumption by a hierarchical wireless sensor network in transmitting data from source to sink. We assume a single-hop multi-level clustered network. The stochastic geometry is used to analytically determine the optimum number of clusters at each level, to show that a multi-level approach can significantly reduce the required network energy.

Network sensor, energy efficiency, network clustering