Power Control for Collaborative Sensors in Internet of Things Environments Using K-means Approach

Energy efficiency in sensor networks is a critical concern, as sensors are often resource-constrained devices with limited battery power. Maximizing energy efficiency is essential to prolonging the network’s lifetime, reducing maintenance costs, and enabling long-term monitoring and data collection in various Internet of Things (IoT) applications. Collaborative beamforming involves multiple sensors that coordinate their signal transmission to be focused on a specific direction. However, sensors may have various energy budget limitations to achieve beamformed signal transmission in a specific direction of the sink. In this paper, we developed a power control approach of beamforming transmission to prolong the lifetime of sensors by organizing the collaborative sensors into clusters. The proposed algorithm is based on the K-means clustering algorithm, which groups these collaborative sensors into clusters based on their residual energy information (REI). REI is changed among collaborative sensors to communicate with each other within a cluster. Therefore, each of these collaborative sensors adjusts its transmission power level to achieve balance in making decisions and facilitate collaboration between sensors in the inner cluster. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm requires significantly low overhead and computational complexity in terms of prolonging the lifetime of the collaborative sensor cluster as compared to alternative power control algorithm that balances the energy consumption of the entire network.