Abstract: Prolonging the network life cycle is an essential requirement for many types of Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) applications. Dynamic clustering of sensors into groups is a popular strategy to maximize the network lifetime and increase scalability. In this strategy, to achieve the sensor nodes’ load balancing, with the aim of prolonging lifetime, network operations are split into rounds, i.e. fixed time intervals. Clusters are configured for the current round and reconfigured for the next round so that the costly role of the cluster head is rotated among the network nodes, i.e. Round-Based Policy (RBP). This load balancing approach potentially extends the network lifetime. However, the imposed overhead, due to the clustering in every round, wastes network energy resources. This paper proposes a distributed energy-efficient scheme to cluster a WSN, i.e. Dynamic Hyper Round Policy (DHRP), which schedules clustering-task to extend the network lifetime and reduce energy consumption. Although DHRP is applicable to any data gathering protocols that value energy efficiency, a Simple Energyefficient Data Collecting (SEDC) protocol is also presented to evaluate the usefulness of DHRP and calculate the end-to-end energy consumption. Experimental results demonstrate that SEDC with DHRP is more effective than two well-known clustering protocols, HEED and M-LEACH, for prolonging the network lifetime and achieving energy conservation.

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