Thus, clustering appears to be an energy-efficient communication
protocol. However, the local base station is assumed
to be a high-energy node; if the base station is an
energy-constrained node, it would die quickly, as it is being
heavily utilized. Thus, conventional clustering would
perform poorly for our model of microsensor networks.
The Near Term Digital Radio (NTDR) project [12, 16], an
army-sponsored program, employs an adaptive clustering
approach, similar to our work discussed here. In this work,
cluster-heads change as nodes move in order to keep the
network fully connected. However, the NTDR protocol is
designed for long-range communication, on the order of 10s
of kilometers, and consumes large amounts of power, on the
order of 10s ofWatts. Therefore, this protocol also does not
fit our model of sensor networks.