An Improved LEACH Routing Protocol for Energy-Efficiency of Wireless Sensor Networks

A wireless sensor network (WSN) is a wireless network consisting of a base station (BS) and multiple micro-sensor nodes. The micro-sensor nodes run on batteries that are not recharged during the network’s lifetime. Therefore, prolonging WSN lifetime is a significant problem. There are some energy-efficient hierarchical routing protocols designed especially for WSNs, such as sensor protocols for information negotiation (SPIN), low-energy adaptive clustering hierarchy (LEACH) and LEACH-centralized (LEACH-C). In this article, we propose an improvement on the LEACH routing protocol to decrease energy consumption and prolong network lifetime. LEACHDistance Energy (LEACH-DE) selects a cluster head node not only by considering residual energy of the node greater than the average residual energy level of nodes in network, but also by examining the geometric distance between the candidate node to the BS as a key parameter. The results of simulation show our proposed algorithm outperforms LEACH and LEACH-C in terms of conserving energy and prolonging WSN lifetime.