A low energy intelligent clustering protocol for wireless sensor networks

LEACH (low-energy adaptive clustering hierarchy) is a well-known self-organizing, adaptive clustering protocol of wireless sensor networks. However it has some shortcomings when it faces such problems as the cluster construction and energy management. In this paper, LEICP (low energy intelligent clustering protocol), an improvement of the LEACH protocol is proposed to overcome the shortcomings of LEACH. LEICP aims at balancing the energy consumption in every cluster and prolonging the network lifetime. A fitness function is defined to balance the energy consumption in every cluster according to the residual energy and positions of nodes. In every round the node called auxiliary cluster-head calculates the position of the cluster-head using Bacterial Foraging Optimization Algorithm (BFOA). After aggregating the data received, the cluster-head node decides whether to choose another cluster-head as the next hop for delivering the messages or to send the data to the base station directly, using Dijkstra algorithm to compute an optimal path. The performance of LEICP is compared with that of LEACH. Simulation results demonstrate that LEICP can prolong the lifetime of the sensor network by about 62.28% compared with LEACH and acquire uniform number of cluster-heads and messages in the network.