An improved Multi-hop Routing Protocol for Large-Scale Wireless Sensor Network Based on Merging Adjacent Clusters

Abstract

It is a great challenge for designing a routing protocol that can maximize the survival time of WSN (Wireless Sensor Network), due to the limited energy of sensor node. As a well-known hierarchical routing protocol in WSN, LEACH protocol could extend the WSN lifetime effectively. It assumes that all nodes can communicate with SINK node directly. With the expansion of WSN scale, the average distances between cluster head node and base station (BS) increase significantly, which results in much more communication energy cost. For the large-scale WSN, this paper proposes a new protocol LEACH-MM. LEACH-MM merges adjacent clusters according to the residual energy of adjacent cluster head nodes. It regards the distance between the cluster head node and SINK node as a measure to construct a multilayer structure of clusters. The experimental result shows that, LEACH-MM can reduce the energy consumption of the whole network effectively and prolong the survival time of the system.