A wireless sensor network comprises a number of small sensors that communicate with each other. Each sensor collects the data and communicates through the network to a single processing center that is a base station. The communication of node and process of message passing consumes energy. This energy consumption by the nodes to transmit data decreases the network lifetime significantly. Clustering is by far the best solution to save the energy consumption in the context of such network. Clustering divides the sensors into groups, so that sensors communicate information only to cluster heads and then the cluster heads communicate the aggregated information to the processing center so as to save energy. This paper studies and discusses various dimensions and approaches of some broadly discovered algorithms for clustering. It also presents a comparative study of various clustering algorithms and discussion about the potential research areas and the challenges of clustering in wireless sensor networks.

base station; clustering; cluster head;multi hop;nodes; sensors; single hop; WSN

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