title: Clustering and Beamforming for Efficient Communication in Wireless Sensor Networks.
abstract: Energy efficiency is a critical issue for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) as sensor nodes have limited power availability. In order to address this issue, this paper tries to maximize the power efficiency in WSNs by means of the evaluation of WSN node networks and their performance when both clustering and antenna beamforming techniques are applied. In this work, four different scenarios are defined, each one considering different numbers of sensors: 50, 20, 10, five, and two nodes per scenario, and each scenario is randomly generated thirty times in order to statistically validate the results. For each experiment, two different target directions for transmission are taken into consideration in the optimization process (φ = 0° and θ = 45°; φ = 45°, and θ = 45°). Each scenario is evaluated for two different types of antennas, an ideal isotropic antenna and a conventional dipole one. In this set of experiments two types of WSN are evaluated: in the first one, all of the sensors have the same amount of power for communications purposes; in the second one, each sensor has a different amount of power for its communications purposes. The analyzed cases in this document are focused on 2D surface and 3D space for the node location. To the authors' knowledge, this is the first time that beamforming and clustering are simultaneously applied to increase the network lifetime in WSNs.
authors.affiliation: Department of Signal Theory, Telematics and Communications-CITIC, University of Granada, 18071 Granada, Spain. franciscoporcel@correo.ugr.es.
authors.forename: Francisco
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Porcel-Rodríguez
authors.affiliation: Department of Signal Theory, Telematics and Communications-CITIC, University of Granada, 18071 Granada, Spain. juanvalenzuela@ugr.es.
authors.forename: Juan
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Valenzuela-Valdés
authors.affiliation: Department of Signal Theory, Telematics and Communications-CITIC, University of Granada, 18071 Granada, Spain. pablopadilla@ugr.es.
authors.forename: Pablo
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Padilla
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Science and Programming Languages, University of Malaga, 29071 Malaga, Spain. flv@lcc.uma.es.
authors.forename: Francisco
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Luna-Valero
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer and Telematics Systems Engineering, University of Extremadura, 06800 Merida, Spain. rmluque@unex.es.
authors.forename: Rafael
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Luque-Baena
authors.affiliation: Department of Signal Theory, Telematics and Communications-CITIC, University of Granada, 18071 Granada, Spain. malg@ugr.es.
authors.forename: Miguel Ángel
authors.initials: MÁ
authors.lastname: López-Gordo
keywords: beamforming; energy efficiency; optimization techniques; wireless sensors networks