In this paper we investigate the usefulness of enforcing a minimum separation distance between cluster heads in a cluster based sensor network, thereby prolonging network lifetime by spreading the cluster heads, thus lowering the average communication energy consumption.
We have performed initial simulations in order to determine how much we can lower the energy consumption in the sensor network by separating the cluster heads. We have also investigated how the number of clusters affect the energy consumption for a given minimum separation distance.
The results show that our sensor network performs up to 150% better when introducing a minimum separation distance between cluster heads, comparing the number of messages received at the base station.
The simulations also show that the minimum separation distance resulting in the lowest energy consumption in our network varies with the number of clusters.