A Novel Method for Clustering in WSNs via TOPSIS Multi-criteria Decision-Making Algorithm

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) refer to countless and numerous sets of low-energy wireless nodes which are used for observing and supervising activities and environmental events such as detecting fire, reporting temperature and humidity, sensing momentary features such as speed, direction, size of an object in mobile targets and in health and medical applications. Lifespan and energy consumption in WSNs are recently regarded as challenging issues. According to the conducted studies regarding routing, it has been found that using multi-hop clustering instead of direct transmission can significantly reduce energy consumption of nodes and enhance network lifetime. Hence, in this paper, using a Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) multi-criteria decision making algorithm, a clustering method was proposed for WSNs. The simulations of the proposed method which were carried out by opnet indicated that the proposed method performed better than other protocols such as IEEE802.15.4 in terms of power consumption and network lifetime.