Improvement of LEACH Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks are aggregates of large number of small, cheap, self-configured and low power sensor nodes. These nodes will sense, and gather various types of information from the environment or system and transmit the data to the base station for monitoring a system or an environment. However, they are characterized by limited resources (like battery, CPU and memory storage) because, they are small in size. Among those battery is a crucial issue, since they are deployed in remote locations. Most battery is consumed when a node sends data and when it routes where to send the data. Hence, energy efficient routing protocols have received significant research attention. This paper focuses on modifying LEACH protocol, which is a well-known energy efficient protocol for minimizing energy and overheads. On the first-round clusters will be formed as in the original LEACH protocol, then nodes will be scheduled for serving as a cluster head on each round turn by turn sequentially. The scheduled node will automatically be cluster head until two-third of its total energy is consumed. After two-third of the total energy has elapsed, re-clustering will be held in order to remove low powered nodes and dead nodes from the schedule. If the scheduled node dies before it serves as a cluster head, the successor scheduled node will serve. The proposed work has been evaluated comparatively using Castalia 3.3 simulator and it out performs the existing LEACH protocol.