A Clustering Protocol Based on the Probability Fading Strategy in WSNs

In WSNs, energy efficiency are considered as the key issues in designing routing protocol. This paper proposes a clustering protocol F-LEACH based on the probability fading strategy. It makes further improvement over LEACH, which gives a better performance on energy consumption and system lifetime. In F-LEACH, nodes are preassigned different cluster-head probability values for cluster-head election in terms of their corresponding distances to the base station (BS). BS can carry out the assignment task. Nodes far from BS get little probability while nodes near BS get great probability. Then nodes elect cluster-heads using their different probability in a self-organizing manner. As a result, less cluster-heads appear in the area far from BS while the total number of cluster-heads is still keep optimal. This help saving the energy consumption by reducing long distance transmission from distant cluster-heads to BS. Simulation results show that F-LEACH performs better than LEACH in terms of energy consumption and system lifetime.