Benchmarks for Evaluation of Wireless Sensor Network Clustering

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) require sensor nodes to collect, aggregate and transmit data to the sink when they sense an event. Clustering has been proven to be an effective technique to do this job with increased efficiency. In clustering, the network is divided into smaller regions, namely clusters, and each cluster has a Cluster Head (CH). Data from all the member nodes in a cluster is collected by CH and then forwarded to the sink after aggregation and processing. Different clustering techniques have different advantages and disadvantages, trade-offs among desired properties and have been assessed using different parameters and metrics. This paper studies various clustering techniques and draws comparisons among them based on their basic working and properties. It also signifies the importance of benchmarking in WSNs and aims to identify benchmarks for the evaluation of the clustering techniques in wireless sensor networks.