Performance Analysis of Wireless Sensor Network by Variation in Cluster Head Selection through mLEACH-CS Algorithm

Abstract

Abstract: The energy depletion at the nodes due to large volume of data transmission and data reception for large scale Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) is one of the important areas of concern. Unbalanced energy consumption due to data traffic overhead at the nodes near the base station (BS) results in early node death and reduction in network lifetime. To balance the load at the wireless nodes during clustering, a novel hybrid clustering and routing protocol has been proposed based on mLEACH (modified Low-Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy) and Cuckoo Search (CS) algorithm. Initially, mLEACH protocol is utilized to solve a novel equation designed to select the cluster heads by rotation at every round of data transmission based on the maximum permissible cluster heads in the network. In the second phase, CS algorithm is implemented for uniform distribution of the cluster heads in the network for efficient multi-hop data routing in the network based on several weighted factors. The performance of the proposed algorithm is compared with other algorithms in literature in terms of energy consumption and network lifetime for different positions of the base station and varied number of cluster heads in the model application area. The proposed mLEACH-CS algorithm shows a significant improvement by 60% considering 300 nodes in the WSN architecture while it decreased to 40% for denser network architecture. Optimal choice of the number and position of the cluster heads in certain network architecture has proved beneficial for designing an energy efficient wireless network with improved network lifetime.