Reliable Enhanced Leach Protocol for Controlling Data Traffic in Event Tracking Systems

Abstract

The sensing of physical environment is strongly established due to high potentials and usage of WSNs’ applications. Nevertheless, efficiency and reliability remain as crucial challenges in deploying and utilizing WSNs thanks to the limitations of the sensing nodes, which have a serious impact on the lifetime of the network operation. As sensors use their energy for performing information transmission and computation, it is important to utilize the energy of the nodes effectively. This requires efficient routing strategies to ensure connectivity and smooth operation of the network as long as possible. LEACH is a hierarchical single-hop routing protocol that can provide satisfactory performance compared to other hierarchical protocols. However, since LEACH is a single-hop protocol, sensor nodes placed far from their sink node consume more energy on transmitting data and, as a result, it may die earlier than nodes nearby the sink. Such situation causes network holes that stop the network from performing its intended strategic roles. Therefore, to take advantage of the useful features of LEACH, it needs be improved in order to minimize and balance energy consumption practically, which would maximize the network lifetime. This paper presents the implementation of an enhanced version of LEACH based on various node functions, such as dynamic transmission ranges, rotation of cluster heads and forwarding nodes. The purpose of the enhanced LEACH is to offer reliability and effective data traffic control for event monitoring in WSN. The enhanced LEACH is developed and evaluated in simulated WSN environment using ns-2. It’s performance is compared to the traditional LEACH. The simulation results showed that enhanced version outperforms the standard version of LEACH in terms of energy consumption, number of alive nodes, and data delivery at the sink.