Performance evaluation of energy efficient routing in wireless sensor networks

Recent advancement in wireless communications and electronics has enabled the development of low-cost sensor networks. The sensor networks can be used for various application areas (e.g., health, military, home). Wireless sensor networks consist of small nodes with sensing, computation, and wireless communications capabilities. Many routing, power management, and data dissemination protocols have been specifically designed for WSNs where energy awareness is an essential design issue. Routing protocols in WSNs might differ depending on the apphcation and network architecture. There is a design trade-off between energy and communication overhead savings in every routing paradigm. This paper provides method for clustering and cluster head selection to WSN to improve energy efficiency. It presents a comparison between LEACH and R-LEACH on the basis of the network lifetime. In this paper, we develop and analyze low-energy adaptive clustering hierarchy (LEACH) that combines the ideas of energy-efficient cluster-based routing and media access together with data aggregation to achieve good performance in terms of system hfetime, latency, and application-perceived quality. Further, we modify one of the most prominent wireless sensor networks routing protocol LEACH as R-LEACH by introducing efficient cluster head replacement and inter cluster communication. Our R-LEACH, in comparison with LEACH performs better using metrics of cluster head formation, network hfe time. Finally a brief performance evaluation of LEACH and R-LEACH is undertaken considering metrics of throughput, network life.