An Efficient and Reliable Clustering Algorithm for

Wireless Sensor Actor Networks (WSANs).

Muazzam Ali Khan+, Ghalib A. Shah++,
Muhammad Ahsan+, Muhammad Sher+.
Department of Computer Science+
International Islamic University Islamabad Pakistan
Department of Computer Engineering,
E & M.E College,++
National University of science & Technology
(NUST) Rawalpindi, Pakistan.
Email: khattakmuazzam@gmail.com



Abstract
Wireless sensor and actor network (WSAN)
is formed by the collaboration of micro-sensor and
actor node. Whenever there is any special event i.e.,
fire, earth quake, flood or enemy attack in the
network, sensor nodes have responsibility to sense it
and send information towards an actor. The actor
node is responsible to take prompt decision and react
accordingly. Sensor nodes have limited resources
which causes the deduction in network life time.
Therefore it is important to efficiently utilize these
resources so that the network life may extend up to its
maximum level.
Clustering is a new approach to efficiently
utilize the energy of sensor nodes. Where the whole
network is divided into group. There is a head election
in each group of sensors. The CH is responsible to
gather sensed data from its underlying sensors and
forward it towards actor node for necessary action
instead every sensor send data to actor. This approach
helps to reduce the network traffic as well as
resources utilization. In this paper we propose a new
energy efficient and reliable clustering algorithm
called Actor directed clustering Protocol (ADCP) that
increases the life time of network. Our simulation
results show that using ADCP the cluster head
efficiently deliver data to an actor node with minimum
delay that helps for taking a quick action and control
the attack in its initial stage.

Index TermsWireless sensor and Actor networks
(WSAN), Cluster head (CH), Actor node, Geocast.

I. INTRODUCTION

Wireless sensor network consists of multiple sensor
nodes and few sink nodes in specific area.


Sensor nodes have very low resources in
term of processing power, energy, data storage and
transmission as well as receiving power. Wireless
Sensor Networks (WSNs) are designed to gather

information about the state of physical world and
transmit the sensed data to intrested users, typically
used in applications like habitat monitoring, military
surveillance, environment sensing and health
monitoring. Nodes in WSNs are generally passive and
unable to react in the physical environment. Wireless
interfaces are used for communication between
different sensor nodes in wireless sensor network [1].
In many applications, however, only observing the
state of the physical world is not sufficient. It is also
sometimes necessary to respond to the sensed
events/data by performing corresponding actions in
that environment. For instance, in a fire handling
system, the actors need to turn on the water sprinklers
on receiving a report of fire. This leads to the
emergence of wireless sensor actor networks
(WSANs)[1][2], which is a substantial extension of
sensor networks, coexistence of sensors and actors in
the same network. Thus, wireless sensor and actor
networks (WSANs) are realized to enable the
application to sense, interact, and change the physical
world, e.g, to monitor and manipulate the temperature
and lighting in specific area or the speed and direction
of a mobile robot.
It is envisioned that WSANs will be one of
the most critical technologies for building the network
infrastructure of future cyber physical systems
[3][4][5]. A WSAN is a networked system of
geographically distributed sensor and actor nodes that
are interconnected through wireless links. Both sensor
and actor nodes are normally equipped with certain
data processing unit, wireless transmission and
receiving antennas and power supply unit. In most
situations, sensor nodes are stationary whereas actor
nodes are mobile, e.g. mobile robots and aerial
vehicles, are mobile. Sensors gather information about
the state of physical world and transmit the collected
data to actors through single hop or multi-hop
communications. On receiving the required
information, the actors make the decision about how
to react to this information and perform corresponding
actions to change the behavior of the physical
978-1-4244-7773-9/10/$26.00 2010 IEEE 332
environment. Sometime there may be a base station
which is responsible for monitoring and managing the
overall network through communications with sensors
and actors. Figure1 show a view of wireless sensor
actor network without a centralized control from a
base station but in most of the cases there is a base
station just like simple wireless sensor networks.
There are actor nodes which are more efficient and
having greater energy than sensor nodes because they
have major responsibilities in the network.



Figure 1. Automated Wireless Sensor Actor Network

Actor nodes have ability to move within the
network and sufficient resources to take some proper
action. For example In case of fire anywhere in the
network the actor need to ON the water sprinkler to
control the fire. b. WSAN also monitor and
manipulate the temperature and lighting in a smart
office. c. In case of mobile robot the actor may be able
to change the velocity and direction of mobile robot
when there is any danger in certain area. Almost all
approaches of clustering concentrate on energy in
wireless sensor networks as well as in wireless sensor
actor networks. Where as our new approach for cluster
formation depends on two important parameters like
distance from actor node and energy of a node to
become a cluster head. In case of any emergency
scenario in WSNs the data is sended to sink node first
and than forwarded to actor node this delay causes the
attack to extend to other parts of the network.
Therefore the new advancement in WSN is to avoid
such kind of delay in taking a prompt action as the
introduction of actor nodes. These are resource rich
nodes as compare to sensor nodes and responsible for
taking action by itself whenever received data from a
sensor. This induction of actor nodes in WSN raised
wireless sensor actor networks (WSAN).
The actor nodes have ability to move from
one place to another therefore we can say that WSAN
is combination of WSN and mobile ad-hoc networks.
There are two types of architectures in WSAN. i).
Semi automated and ii) Automated. In semi automated
architecture the sink node is responsible to deliver data
to actor nodes. The sensor nodes sense an event and
send it to sink node then sink node forward data to
actor node for necessary action. While in automated
architecture the sensor nodes directly deliver sensed
data to actor nodes. Therefore automated architecture
is much better and efficient than semi automated
architecture. In many delay intolerance applications
automated architecture perform better for example in a
fire scenario the sensor node nearest to that location
will sense some smoke or increase in temperature at
that region. This sensed information by sensor node is
delivered to actor nodes directly without any delay
through cluster heads and the fire event is controlled
within its initial stages. If same scenario is considered
for a semi automated architecture than the sensed
information delivery to sink node first and than to
actor causes extra delay [6]. In cluster based technique
the whole network is divided into groups where each
group is called cluster. In each cluster there is a cluster
head that actually act as a coordinator. For any node to
become a cluster head there is a head election process
in each group for some time depends on different
parameters (energy, position etc) and any node who
fulfill the criteria announced itself as a CH in that
group and the other nodes in its neighbor will register
themselves as a member. Every member of the cluster
head will communicate through its CH.
Whenever a node want to communicate with
another node outside that cluster, will contact to its
CH. Therefore the overhead produced in individual
communication by each node is minimized through
this approach. The network traffic is reduced through
cluster head communication similarly it also reduced
the energy consumption of sensor nodes because they
are only responsible to deliver data to their respective
CHs and than further more the responsibility is
transfered to cluster head that have greater energy than
the remaining nodes in that area. The rest of the paper
is organized as follow in section II we have discussed
work of different researchers and evaluate it critically.
Section III describes operation and cluster formation
through our new protocol ADCP (Actor directed
clustering Protocol). In section IV we explain and
analyze our final results and compare with existing
protocols. Section V that is the last section describes
our conclusion and future work.

II. RELATED WORK

Most research work has been done in WSN
for cluster formation, still there is need to concentrate
on clustering in WSANs. To date existing clustering
algorithms in WSN are mostly used in WSAN.
However to the best of our knowledge there are few
algorithms for clustering in WSAN. However the
framework of WSAN is quite different from WSN,
because in WSN sensor nodes (may be static or
mobile) but the base station is mostly static. Although
in WSAN there is no concept of base station these are
fully automated systems as discussed in introduction.
Where both sensor as well as actor nodes are in direct
contact through their CHs. In semi automated
architecture delay occur in communication among
sensor, base station and actor node while this is fully
controlled through direct access of sensor nodes to
actor node. There are many restrictions like power
(Transmission and reception), storage and processing
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in sensor nodes therefore many algorithms are still
proposed in the research community, like G.A.Shah et
al [6] proposed real time coordination and routing
frame work (RCR) for WSAN. They used a dynamic
weighted clustering algorithm for cluster formation on
the basis of delay budget estimation. S.lindsey et al [7]
also work on energy efficiency of the sensor nodes
and proposed a new approach for data gathering in
wireless sensor network their results also shows that
the proposed approach is far better than the previous
one. W.R.Heinzelman [8] proposed a clustering
algorithm known as leach (low energy adaptive cluster
head algorithm).
Leach is a localized algorithm in which each
node has its own probability to become a cluster head.
Each node which has greater probability over its
neighbors is elected as cluster head. The probability of
a node is decided on the basis of its energy; therefore
leach has few flaws in election of cluster heads, like
many CH located in one region. Gupta et al[9] also
proposed a new approach to resolve the issues of CH
election in leach. For this purpose they used fuzzy
logic techniques. They used few fuzzy variables like
nodes energy as well as concentration of sensor nodes
at specific location and centrality (position of a node
in the network). However this approach also has issues
due to its centralized nature. An attempt to resolve
these issues by Jong.Myoung.Kim, et al [10] in 2008.
They tried to improve the work of gupta by proposing
new mechanism for CH election using the same fuzzy
logic approach in WSN. They make the CH election
mechanism more efficient by removing the
involvement of base station. However CHEF also have
problem to implement in WSAN due to existence of
actor nodes. Sajid Hussain et al [11] proposed another
protocol for clustering in WSN. His protocol is fully
based on leach algorithm but here the CH burden is
reduced by dividing its burden over few neighbors
nodes that are called their associates. Because of these
associates the energy consumption of the CH reduced
and they stay for longer time in the network. However
the main drawback is that CH election is fully
dependent on base station.
Thomas a babbitt et al [12] recently
proposed a new protocol known as self selecting
reliable path routing protocol (SRP) for wireless
sensor networks. SRP protocol totally based on SSR
protocol. SSR is a memory-less protocol. The major
advantage of SRP protocol is that it converge traffic to
a reliable and shortest route in the terms of number of
hops in the route as well as link failure probability.
This protocol also memorizes the traversed routes.
Alper berketli et al [13] proposed Event to sink
directing clustering (ESDC) protocol for wireless
sensor networks. The main concentration of this
protocol is formation of cluster efficiently whenever
any event occur in the network and similarly discover
the route towards sink at the same time. This
technique is used to save nodes energy in ESDC
protocol.

A. Major drawbacks in existing clustering
Algorithms
After literature survey we are able to claim that the
existing clustering algorithms have the following
drawbacks.
1) Most Clustering algorithms are designed for static
wireless sensor networks.
2) The existing clustering algorithms dont consider
the position of actor in the network for cluster
formation they mostly concentrate on energy of nodes.
3) These algorithms do not consider distance between
two CH so there is possibility that few CHs may lies
too close to
each other.
4) Few algorithms although do not consider the energy
parameter to elect a CH. Therefore it may cause a
more alarming situation by electing a low energy node
as CH. It also decreases the life time of network.
5) There is also possibility that the CH may be at any
corner of the network from where it cannot
communicate efficiently with other CHs.

III. ACTOR DIRECTED CLUSTERING
PROTOCOL (ADCP)

In this section we discuss the main operation
of cluster formation through our proposed protocol
actor directed clustering protocol (ADCP). Our cluster
formation is fully based on two main parameters
position of a node with respect to actor and remaining
energy of node. The main objective of this protocol is
to achieve reliable and efficient communication with
low energy consumption in WSAN.



Figure 2. Homogenous WSAN network for
temperature control


In Homogenous WSAN it is easy to create
clusters for efficient and secure communication figure
2 shows homogenous WSAN network for temperature
control in certain area. Where empty circles are sensor
nodes colored circles are cluster heads and triangle
represent actor nodes in the network.

A. Cluster Formation

Cluster formation in WSAN is very
important because we have to take care for efficient
334
and reliable communication of all sensors, actors as
well as head election in these clusters. There are
certain restrictions on cluster formation and cluster
head election process which are
1. The Cluster head election is dependent on location
of actor node in that area as well as energy of sensor
node wants to be a cluster head.
2. There will be no cluster head creation within the
directly attached neighbours of an existing cluster
head.
3. A node will be elected as a cluster head which has
lower distance with actor node as well as maximum
energy in that cluster.
4. If a node nearest to the actor node has lower energy
than the required energy than the next nearest node
may be elected as cluster head, because we cannot
compromise on energy in these sensitive networks.





Figure 3. Actor Directed Clustering protocol (ADCP)

The CH election started near to the actor
node and than move onward in the network. Every
node shares its information with its neighbor nodes at
distance of one hop and maintains a list of its neighbor
information like position, energy, and distance with
actor node and to which CH it belongs. A node that is
nearest to actor node and having maximum energy
will announce itself as CH. Than the other nodes in its
range will become members of that cluster and
whenever they sense certain data they will forward it
to their respective CHs.

Figure 4. Flow Chart of Cluster Formation in WSAN

The flow chart given in figure 4 explain
procedure of cluster formation, initially the procedure
starts with set up of sensor nodes, actors and phenom
nodes in particular area. Than the sensor nodes
exchange their probability with nearest nodes in
neighbors for cluster head election. Any node which
has greater probability as compare to its neighbor
nodes announced itself as a CH in cluster formation
phase and the same procedure is extended throughout
the network.

B. Algorithm 1: Cluster Head Election and
formation in WSAN

Input:
E - Initial Energy of Sensor Node
P - Initial position of Sensor Node with respect to
actor
P(CH) - Probability of a node to become a cluster
head.

Output:
Optimized WSAN cluster with cluster head having
maximum energy, nearest to actor node.

Process:
I. Initialize
2. Nodes send their initial Position with respect to
Actor node and Energy to its neighbors
3. Compute probability (PCH) & compare with
neighbors
4. Advertise beacon messages to other nodes
5. Own CH = me
6. While (receive-beacon message = = TRUE)
7. If Own beacon received beacon && dist(own
CH,AN)
less than (received beacon, AN)
8. Than
9. Own CH = N;
10. PCH = PCH of N;
11. end if
12. end while
13. If ( Own CH head = me)
14. than
15. broadcast CH - beacon
16. return own CH
17. else
18. on receiving CH - beacon
19. Invoke select - closest CH( ) procedure
20. end if
21. return closest CH.

To find probability P(CH) of any node to become a
cluster head we use fuzzy logic. There are two fuzzy
variables used as an input. 1. Energy of the sensor
node. 2. Position of the sensor node with respect to
actor node. For this purpose if than rule is used to
achieve probability (PCH) of a node. If probability is
high it means the node have greater chance to become
a cluster head. Each node A will check its energy and
calculate its distance with actor node in specific range
called r where r can be calculated for actor. We
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assume that actor position is known to every sensor
node. Probability of a node to become a cluster head
can be calculated with this formula PCH = E / DA
where PCH is probability of a node to become a
cluster head, E is energy of the node who is a
candidate for cluster head election and DA is the
distance of that node from its nearest actor node in the
network. In these three parameters energy is more
important than the other two parameters therefore if
energy of a node is lower although its distance with
actor node may be lower and high from a cluster head
it could be a cluster head. Table 1 shows probability of
nodes to elect or fail in cluster head election using the
above formula.



TABLE I
NODES PROBABILITY TO BECOME A CLUSTER HEAD

After cluster formation any node who wants to send
data to an actor will first forward it to its cluster head
(CH) and than CH will further propagate that message
toward actor. For this purpose CH will also set the
next node to forward data which satisfy the energy
level up to a pre-defined threshold and also directly
accessible to it. If energy of nearest node towards an
actor is lower than the threshold, data packets will be
forwarded to next nearest node satisfying the energy
condition.

IV. SIMULATION PARAMETERS AND
RESULTS

In this section we discuss our simulation parameters
and results and also compare with few existing
protocols. Our simulation scenario consist of two
phenom nodes, 1- 5 actor nodes with random nodes
deployment and variable network density in the range
from 50 nodes to 1000 nodes. Table 2 explains our
simulation parameters in detail.



TABLE II
SIMULATION PARAMETERS

Result graph in figure 5 shows a comparison of our
proposed protocol for clustering ADCP and SRP for
end to end delay and number of sources in the
network. From graph 5 it is clear that both protocols
have same end to end delay when number of sources
in the network is 5 and 10 respectively.


Figure 5. End to End delay vs Number of Sources

However at node density 15 to 40 the ADCP protocol
delay is lower than SRP protocol because in ADCP
the cluster formation is on the basis of distance from
actor node therefore the sensed data is directly
forwarded to nearest actor node instead of a base
station. Graph in figure 5 shows the comparison of our
proposed protocol ADCP for clustering and HEED
[15] for energy dissipated in clustering with respect to
node density in the network. The dissipated energy in
the network for clustering increases as node density
increases. However the difference of energy dissipated
in ADCP and HEED is much lower.


Figure 6. Energy consumption vs Number of nodes

Which prove that ADCP is an energy efficient
protocol. Figure 6 shows average delay in network
with respect to number of nodes. There are 50 to 400
nodes within same environmental condition. Average
delay in the network is gradually increases as node
density increases however over all delay did not
increase than 0.03; the main reason behind this
increase is increasing number of intermediate nodes
which causes delay in packets forwarding. However
one important thing should be mention here is that
average delay and energy dissipation in our protocol
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mainly depends on the position of actor nodes as well
phenom nodes in the network.


Figure 7. Average delay vs Number of Nodes

Figure 8 show throughput vs sample ate as the sample
rate of phenom nodes increases number of packet
received by actor nodes increases therefore the
throughput of whole network increases with time.


Figure 8. Throughput vs Sample rate.

Result graph in figure 9 shows the relation between
network throughput and node density. As the number
of nodes increases throughput of the network
gradually decreases, however the overall throughput
of the network is above 85 percent that is far better in
such scenarios.


Figure 9. Throughput vs Number of nodes


V. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK

In this paper, we proposed a new protocol
for cluster formation in wireless sensor actor
networks. In WSAN efficient and reliable
communication is needed of todays insecure world.
The existing clustering protocols cause some delay in
sensor to actor communication which provide an
opportunity of penetration or destruction to an
attacker.

The proposed protocol reduce the end to end
delay as well as energy consumption because the
cluster head election is based on two important
parameters, distance from its nearest actor node as
well energy. Any node that has more probability to
become a cluster head is elected as CH. We conclude
that our proposed protocol for cluster formation is
efficient, reliable and also energy efficient. This new
protocol also improves efficiency of routing in
wireless sensor actor network. The future direction
may the addition of few other parameters like distance
from other cluster heads, variable mobility of nodes
and time for reactivation of cluster head election.

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