Energy Efficient Wireless Sensor Network with Modified LEACH Algorithm

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are highly integrated technologies applying sensor technology, micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) and wireless networks technologies. They are widely used in many applications to acquire and process information. Many routing protocols are proposed for controlling the networks. The main problem, which the WSN protocols face, is that the sensors‟ limited batter energy. Then the protocols have to be energy efficient to prolong the networks lifetime. Nowadays, there are several routing protocols which are designed to prolong the network life. Low Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy (LEACH) is an outstanding and commonly used protocol designed for this purpose. To be energy efficient, the protocol applies cluster organization on the networks. It divides the sensor nodes into several clusters, and sends fusion cluster data through a cluster head, which is a representative node of one region. In this thesis, we propose the method which improves the LEACH algorithm. The proposed method firstly defines the fix round time. During the fixed round time, if a cluster head indicates lower energy level than the defined threshold, the cluster head will be transferred to another cluster member owning largest energy, and then the new cluster head continues to work until the round time is end. Therefore, the method avoids the unnecessary re-clustering of the whole network. Simulation results show that the proposed method performs better on prolonging the lifetime of a network than LEACH. In a random distribution, the proposed method prolongs the lifetime of the network almost more 20% rounds than LEACH does. While in an unbalanced distribution, the proposed performs much better, prolonging about 33% in our simulation.