Distance and energy aware extended LEACH using secondary cluster head for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Sensor node's energy consumption is a crucial consideration for designing a wireless sensor network (WSN) as the node is battery powered with limited energy that significantly affects the network lifetime. An efficient design of routing protocol can play an important role to ensure optimum use of node's energy to increase the scalability and lifetime of the network. A clustering-based routing protocol like low energy adaptive clustering hierarchical (LEACH) has attracted much attention in recent years as the network lifetime is effectively increased due to the formation of clusters using sensor nodes. However, the protocol shows the limited performance when the cluster head (CH) selection uses the node having low energy level and far distance from the base station (BS). Here, the selection of secondary cluster head (2CH) is useful, where the member node having the highest residual energy can act as a relay node for data aggregation and ensure the optimum utilization of available energy. In this article, two LEACH protocols namely E-LEACH and DE-LEACH are characterized and further extended by adding the secondary cluster heads, which eventually ensure the optimum choice of CH for sustaining more energy in the network. The proposed Extended E-LEACH and Extended DE-LEACH protocols are analyzed using the network lifetime and total energy consumption and the results show an improved system performance compared to existing 2CH based routing protocols like FLEACH and FLEACH-E. The Extended DE-LEACH shows the best results among all the protocols. In particular, total energy consumption for Extended DE-LEACH is improved by a maximum of 5%, 11% and 21% as compared to Extended E-LEACH, FLEACH-E and FLEACH respectively.