Fuzzy logic based energy efficient adaptive clustering protocol

In order to overcome the problem of the limited power of the sensor battery and thus prolonging the lifetime of a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN), many routing algorithms were proposed to gather and forward the sensed data to the base station. One of the most well-known routing algorithms that were proposed in the last years is the LEACH protocol. It is a dynamic cluster-based routing protocol that divides the network lifetime to rounds where each round is composed of two phases: setup and steady state. The key factor of each round is the number of nodes that will act as cluster heads (CHs). Each CH is responsible for collecting the sensed data from the sensor nodes that are in the same cluster and then forwarding the aggregated data to the base station. In this paper we suggest FL-LEACH protocol that employs fuzzy logic in order to determine the number of CHs that should be used in the WSN. FL-LEACH is a fuzzy inference system that depends on two variables: number of nodes in the network and nodes density. Assuming uniform distribution of the nodes over the sensor field, the novelty of the proposed approach is in its ability to determine the number of CHs without getting other information about the network. Matlab simulation is used to show the effectiveness of the FL-LEACH protocol compared with other protocols, such as the pure LEACH and the genetic-based protocol, LEACH-GA. Simulation results have shown that FL-LEACH outperforms LEACH and LEACH-GA in terms of network lifetime.