A consistent approach towards clustering in low energy adaptive clustering hierarchy protocol

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) facilitate efficient and reliable monitoring of specified area for multiple applications. Variety of protocols are designed to increase the effectiveness and lifetime of WSNs. Low Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy (LEACH) protocol is one of them. LEACH is a hierarchical clustering based protocol where data is transferred to the data evaluation center through an intermediary node i.e., cluster head (CH). Cluster heads (CHs) consume much more energy than normal sensor nodes which requires CH's job to be rotated among all the nodes. CHs are chosen randomly with a predefined probability of fixed update intervals (round) to preserve energy of each node and to increase the lifetime of the whole network. In this paper, we propose an enhancement to the LEACH protocol. The clustering mechanism in LEACH protocol is not efficient to endorse optimal number of CHs. The proposed clustering algorithm selects nearly equal number of CHs in each round to evenly distribute the energy dissipation and therefore delays node failures and increases the network lifetime.