EBK-Means: A Clustering Technique based on Elbow Method and K-Means in WSN

consist of hundreds of thousands of small and cost effective sensor nodes. Sensor nodes are used to sense the environmental or physiological parameters like temperature, pressure, etc. For the connectivity of the sensor nodes, they use wireless transceiver to send and receive the inter-node signals. Sensor nodes, because connect their selves wirelessly, use routing process to route the packet to make them reach from source to destination. These sensor nodes run on batteries and they carry a limited battery life. Clustering is the process of creating virtual sub-groups of the sensor nodes, which helps the sensor nodes to lower routing computations and to lower the size routing data. There is a wide space available for the research on energy efficient clustering algorithms for the WSNs. LEACH, PEGASIS and HEED are the popular energy efficient clustering protocols for WSNs. In this research, we are working on the development of a hybrid model using LEACH based energy efficient and K-means based quick clustering algorithms to produce a new cluster scheme for WSNs with dynamic selection of the number of the clusters automatically. In the proposed method, finding an optimum "k" value is performed by Elbow method and clustering is done by k-means algorithm, hence routing protocol LEACH which is a traditional energy efficient protocol takes the work ahead of sending data from the cluster heads to the base station. The results of simulation show that at the end of some certain part of running the proposed algorithm, at some point the marginal gain will drop dramatically and gives an angle in the graph. The correct "k" i.e. number of clusters is chosen at this point, hence the "elbow criterion".