Improved LEACH protocol for increasing the lifetime of WSNs

Abstract

Recently, wireless sensor network (WSN) is taking a high place in several applications: military, industry, and environment. The importance of WSNs in current applications makes the WSNs the most developed technology at the research level and especially in the field of communication and computing. However, WSN’s performance deals with a number of challenges. Energy consumption is the most considerable for many researchers because nodes use energy to collect, treat, and send data, but they have restricted energy. For this reason, numerous efficient energy routing protocols have been developed to save the consumption of power. Low energy adaptive clustering hierarchy (LEACH) is considered as the most attractive one in WSNs. In the present document, we evaluate the LEACH approach effectiveness in the cluster-head (CH) choosing and in data transmission, then we propose an enhanced protocol. The proposed algorithm aims to improve energy consumption and prolong the lifetime of WSN through selecting CHs depending on the remaining power, balancing the number of nodes in clusters, determining abandoned nodes in order to send their data to the sink. Then CHs choose the optimal path to achieve the sink. Simulation results exhibit that the enhanced method can decrease the consumption of energy and prolong the life-cycle of the network.