무선 네트워크를 위한 하향식 클러스터링 프로토콜의 구현

Implementation of a Top-down Clustering Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Many researches have been performed to increase energy-efficiency in wireless sensor networks. One of primary research topics is about clustering protocols, which are adopted to configure sensor networks in the form of hierarchical structures by grouping sensor nodes into a cluster. However, legacy clustering protocols do not propose detailed methods from the perspective of implementation to determine a cluster's boundary and configure a cluster, and to communicate among clusters. Moreover, many of them involve assumptions inappropriate to apply those to a sensor field. In this paper, we have designed and implemented a new T-Clustering (Top-down Clustering) protocol, which takes into considerations a node's density, a distance between cluster heads, and remained energy of a node all together. Our proposal is a sink-node oriented top-down clustering protocol, and can form uniform clusters throughout the network. Further, it provides re-clustering functions according to the state of a network. In order to verify our protocol's feasibility, we have implemented and experimented T-Clustering protocol on Crossbow's MICAz nodes which are executed on TinyOS 2.0.2.