T-LEACH: The method of threshold-based cluster head replacement for wireless sensor networks

In wireless sensor networks, power is the most essential resource because each sensor node has limited batteries. Many kinds of existing clustering protocols have been developed to balance and maximize lifetime of the sensor nodes in wireless sensor networks. These protocols select cluster heads periodically, and they considered only ‘How can we select cluster heads energy-efficiently?’ or ‘What is the best selection of cluster heads?’ without considering energy-efficient period of the cluster heads replacement. Unnecessary head selection may dissipate limited battery power of the entire sensor networks. In this paper, we present T-LEACH, which is a threshold-based cluster head replacement scheme for clustering protocols of wireless sensor networks. T-LEACH minimizes the number of cluster head selection by using threshold of residual energy. Reducing the amount of head selection and replacement cost, the lifetime of the entire networks can be extended compared with the existing clustering protocols. Our simulation results show that T-LEACH outperformed LEACH in terms of balancing energy consumption and network lifetime.