Minimizing effective energy consumption in multi-cluster sensor networks for source extraction

This paper studies a multi-cluster sensor network which is applied for source extraction in a sensing field. Both the performance of source extraction and the total energy consumption in the sensor network are functions of the number of clusters. In this paper, we aim at finding the optimal number of clusters by minimizing the effective energy consumption which is defined as the ratio of the performance of source extraction to the total energy consumption in the sensor network. A particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm is employed to form the clusters which enables every cluster to perform source extraction. The existence and the uniqueness of the optimum number of clusters is proven theoretically and shown by numerical simulations. The relationship between the optimum number of clusters and the various system parameters are investigated. A tradeoff between the performance and the total energy consumption is illustrated. The results show that the performance is greatly improved by adopting the multi-cluster structure of the sensor network.