An Improved LEACH Protocol for Application-Specific Wireless Sensor Networks

For wireless sensor networks, how to efficiently utilize limited energy directly affects the lifetime and the cost. LEACH is a clustering-based protocol with good performance, which employs localized coordination to balance the energy usage. In this paper, an improved LEACH protocol is proposed with a more reasonable set-up phase. The proposed protocol focuses on saving the energy cost induced due to redundant nodes and balancing the energy consumption among sensor nodes by splitting large clusters into smaller ones. Simulation results, compared with LEACH, demonstrate that the proposed protocol can reduce energy consumption and hence prolong the lifetime of WSN.