Combination of MDC and K-Means to improve LEACH

Abstract

Energy consumption reduction has become a key research area in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Several studies have been done in order to reduce energy consumption in WSN. However, only few of them have studied Quality of Service (QoS) criteria such as throughput and latency. Therefore, this study proposes a new hybrid protocol called MDC-LEACH-K, which is a combination between Low Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy-K-Means LEACH-K (approach) and MDC, to improve the LEACH protocol. Specifically, the purpose of the proposed protocol is to extend the network life time and improve its quality of service criteria. Specifically, this protocol uses K-Means clustering algorithm to reduce energy consumption in Cluster Head (CH) election phase and to improve the election of CH. In addition, a mobile data collector (MDC) is used as an intermediate between the cluster head and the base station (BS) to further enhance the QoS criteria of WSN, to minimize time delays during data collection and to improve the transmission phase of LEACH protocol. The obtained simulation results demonstrate that MDC-LEACH-K had a considerable impact on energy consumption and QoS metrics. Particularly, this protocol achieves a significant energy gains by 296% of residual energy compared to Low Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy protocol (LEACH), 237% to Threshold Sensitive Energy Efficient sensor Network protocol (TEEN), and 257% to Low Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy-KMeans protocol (LEACH-K) and more than 100% compared to LEACH, TEEN, LEACH-K and MDC maximum residual energy LEACH protocols in latency time.