Selection of Energy Efficient Clustering Algorithm upon Cluster Head Failure in Wireless Sensor Network

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) applications have increased in recent times in fields such as environmental sensing, area monitoring, air pollution monitoring, forest res detection, machine health monitoring, and landslide detection. In such applications, there is a high need of secure communication among sensor nodes. There are different techniques to secure network data transmissions, but due to power constraints of WSN, group key based mechanism is the most preferred one. Hence, to implement scalable energy efficient secure group communication, the best approach would be hierarchical based like Clustering. In most of the WSN designs based on clustering, Base Station (BS) is the central point of contact to the outside world and in case of its failure; it may lead to total disconnection in the communication. Critical applications like these cannot afford to have BS failure as it is a gateway from sensor networks to the outside world. In order to provide better fault tolerant immediate action, a new BS at some other physical location will have to take the charge. This may lead to a total change in the hierarchical network topology, which in turn leads to re-clustering the entire network and in turn formation of new security keys. Therefore, there is a need to find a suitable algorithm which clusters sensor nodes in such a way that when a BS fails and a new BS takes the charge, new group key gets established with minimum computation and less energy consumption.