Optimal Cluster Head Positioning Algorithm for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are increasingly gaining popularity, especially with the advent of many artificial intelligence (AI) driven applications and expert systems. Such applications require specific relevant sensors’ data to be stored, processed, analyzed, and input to the expert systems. Obviously, sensor nodes (SNs) have limited energy and computation capabilities and are normally deployed remotely over an area of interest (AoI). Therefore, proposing efficient protocols for sensing and sending data is paramount to WSNs operation. Nodes’ clustering is a widely used technique in WSNs, where the sensor nodes are grouped into clusters. Each cluster has a cluster head (CH) that is used to gather captured data of sensor nodes and forward it to a remote sink node for further processing and decision-making. In this paper, an optimization algorithm for adjusting the CH location with respect to the nodes within the cluster is proposed. This algorithm aims at finding the optimal CH location that minimizes the total sum of the nodes’ path-loss incurred within the intra-cluster communication links between the sensor nodes and the CH. Once the optimal CH is identified, the CH moves to the optimal location. This suggestion of CH re-positioning is frequently repeated for new geometric position. Excitingly, the algorithm is extended to consider the inter-cluster communication between CH nodes belonging to different clusters and distributed over a spiral trajectory. These CH nodes form a multi-hop communication link that convey the captured data of the clusters’ nodes to the sink destination node. The performance of the proposed CH positioning algorithm for the single and multi-clusters has been evaluated and compared with other related studies. The results showed the effectiveness of the proposed CH positioning algorithm.