Analytical Modelling of ANCH Clustering Algorithm for WSNs

Wireless sensor networks are a popular choice in a vast number of applications, despite their energy constraints, due to their distributed nature, low cost infrastructure deployment and administration. One of the main approaches for addressing the energy consumption and network congestion issues is to organise the sensors in clusters. The number of clusters and also distribution of Cluster Heads are essential for energy efficiency and adaptability of clustering approaches. ANCH is a new energy-efficient clustering algorithm proposed recently for wireless sensor networks to prolong network lifetime by uniformly distributing of Cluster Heads across the network. In this paper, we propose an analytical method to model the energy consumption of the ANCH algorithm. The results of our extensive simulation study show a reasonable accuracy of the proposed analytical model to predict the energy consumption under different operational conditions. The proposed analytical model reveals a number of implications regarding the effects of different parameters on the energy consumption pattern of the ANCH clustering algorithm.