QoS-Oriented Asynchronous Clustering Protocol in Wireless Sensor Networks

The Quality of Service (QoS) to deliver time- and delay-sensitive data is critical in events-driven sensor network applications, which are constrained by energy consumption requirements. So far, most clustering proposals on this problem were based on periodic synchronous approaches, which require time synchronization and are not suitable for events-driven applications. The authors propose a QoS-oriented events-driven asynchronous clustering protocol, called EEAC (Energy-Efficient Asynchronous Clustering), which can deliver traffic in a timely and reliable manner. In EEAC, clustering starts asynchronously according to a probability, determined by cluster-heads' data transmission rate and residual energy.