By analyzing the impact of failure of different nodes on the coverage efficiency, an energy and coverage aware
clustering algorithm(ECCA) for wireless sensor networks is proposed, which does not rely on the nodes’ physical location.
With ECCA, the nodes in the high-density areas have high priority to be selected as cluster heads, and then the cluster head
role migrates to other nodes when its residual energy is lower than the energy threshold. The method can effectively reduce
the nodes’ mortality and balance the energy consumption. The complexity of algorithm and the choice of optimal broadcast
radius are analyzed further. Simulation results show that, compared with existing algorithms, the quality of the coverage is
improved and the network lifetime is prolonged efficiently.