Energy Aware LEACH Protocol for WSNs

Abstract

LEACH is a clustering routing protocol in wireless sensor networks. This protocol frequently forms clusters of nodes and selects one of the cluster members as the cluster head. The two-tier structure of LEACH divides the network into two layers: (1) cluster members, which collect raw data from the environment and (2) cluster heads, which receive the collected data from cluster-members, fuse the received data and transmit that to the base station. LEACH reduces the energy consumption of nodes since the most energy-consuming task, which is the long-distance transmission to the base station takes place only in cluster heads. LEACH selects the cluster heads uniformly using a probabilistic calculation. However, there are other parameters that affect the energy consumption of nodes. As a result, the selected nodes may not be that strong to handle the high workload of a cluster head; their energy will be depleted very soon; the network lifetime and throughput decline. To overcome this tradeoff, in this paper, we propose EA-LEACH (Energy Aware LEACH), a new clustering routing protocol, which selects cluster heads using their residual energies. This method provides an appropriate selection of cluster heads that are strong enough to handle the expected workload of cluster heads to reach high throughput. We validated the effectiveness and efficiency of our protocol through simulations. The analysis of our results shows that the cluster heads selected by our proposed protocol prolong the network lifetime by 60% in comparison to those selected by LEACH. As a result, the nodes transmit significantly more amount of data during their lifetime.