This paper presents a new clustering protocol for designing energy-efficient hierarchical wireless sensor networks (WSNs) by dividing the distributed sensor network into virtual sensor groups to satisfy the scalability and prolong the network lifetime in large-scale applications. The proposed approach is a distributed clustering protocol called DCPVP, which is based on voting and priority ideas. In the DCPVP protocol, the size of clusters is based on the distance of nodes from the data link such as base station (BS) and the local node density. The cluster heads are elected based on the mean distance from neighbors, remaining energy and the times of being elected as cluster head. The performance of the DCPVP protocol is compared with some well-known clustering protocols in literature such as the LEACH, HEED, WCA, GCMRA and TCAC protocols. The simulation results confirm that the prioritizing- and voting-based election ideas decrease the construction time and the energy consumption of clustering progress in sensor networks and consequently improve the lifetime of networks with limited resources and battery powered nodes in harsh and inaccessible environments.

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Since unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been introduced as mobile nodes for data gathering, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have progressed considerably. The resulting WSN-UAV systems are employed for emergency applications and also for remote monitoring purposes. WSN-UAV systems yield an optimum data gathering method using the WSN. In the proposed method, the nodes' data are transferred using a remotely operated vehicle (drone) rather than the conventional data transferring methods like the direct and hop-to-hop data transmission approaches. Then, the gathered data are delivered in the pre-determined destination point. WSN-UAV systems, in fact, are a special case of the systems with the mobile sink in which the sink path is previously specified and controlled. In this paper, the effects of clustering parameters on the WSNs are studied; then, the network's lifetime is prolonged by applying some parameters. In addition, the network's performance is enhanced to some extent by assigning some changes in the media access control (MAC) layer. Also, the effect of drone's path pattern on the lifetime of the network is studied.clustering, MAC, mobile sink, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), wireless sensor network (WSN), WSN-UAV

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