A Channel Reuse Procedure in Clustering Sensor Networks

Sensor nodes having the limited resource, energy efficiency is an important issue. Clustering on the sensor networks reduces the volume of inter-node communications and raises energy efficiency by transmitting the data collected from members by a cluster head to a sink node. But, due to radio frequency characteristics, interference and collision can occur between neighbor clusters, the resulted re-transmission is more energy consuming. The interference and collision occurred among adjacent clusters can be resolved by assigning non-overlapping channels among neighbor clusters. In this paper, we propose a channel reuse procedure which shows practical steps to assign dynamically channels among adjacent clusters in sensor networks. This method is expected to perform successfully the allocation process of non-overlapping channels for various cluster topologies.