A Distributed Clustering Scheme with Self Nomination: Proposal and Application to Critical Monitoring

Clustering is a well known methodology to optimize the use of the resources, to lower the congestion and to improve the reliability in self-organized networks as the Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). This paper deals with the proposal of a novel clustering approach based on a low complexity distributed Cluster Head (CH) election based on a two-stage process. In particular, a suitable objective function is introduced in order to take into account the number of 1-hop neighbours (i.e., node degree) and the residual node energy. It is shown in the paper that the proposed protocol achieves remarkable performance improvements with respect to di↵erent alternatives, especially in the case of unpredictable scenarios. Moreover, the proposed protocol exhibits self-organize capabilities that are of special interest for critical monitoring applications, in particular when the e↵ect of nodes mobility is significant.