Adaptive Freeshape Clustering for Balanced Energy Saving in the WirelessHART Networks

The frequent data convergecasting from the sensor nodes to the gateways may cause imbalanced energy consumption in the Wireless Highway Addressable Remote Transducer (WirelessHART) networks, yielding a short network lifetime and frequent failures in the data acquisition. Existing solutions always tend to tradeoff between the hardware cost, routing complexity, and energy consumption, making the sensor nodes suffer from expensive hardware investment, overloaded network computation, or imbalanced energy consumption. In this paper, an Adaptive Freeshape Clustering (AFC) protocol is developed for saving and balancing the energy consumption in the WirelessHART networks. In AFC, the Region of Interest (RoI) is first divided into several fan-shaped clusters. The sensor nodes in each fan-shaped cluster compete for the positions of Cell Node (CN), and the nodes that have succeeded in the competition adjust the radius of their coverages to cover the fan-shaped clusters adaptively with the minimum overlapped areas. In this way, each fan-shaped cluster can be subdivided into several freeshape zones regarding each CN’s coverage, and the CN in each cluster takes charge of convergecasting the data to the CH. The simulations show that AFC can prolong the network lifetime by 37% compared with other related schemes, e.g., HEED, FLOODING, and DIRECT, whereas it can reduce the degree of energy imbalance by 1.29%.