Study on Energy Efficient Hierarchical Routing Protocols of Wireless Sensor Network

Wireless sensor networks are composed of cheap sensor nodes with limited energy resources. These networks require robust wireless communication protocols that are energy efficient in order to prolong the lifetime of the entire network. This paper studies the routing protocols and analyzes the performance of LEACH (low-energy adaptive clustering hierarchy) in-depth. It is found that the cluster heads selecting algorithm in LEACH is not the best, because it dose not take the residual energy of the nodes into account. And when it sends data to the base station, it is in the form of one-hop routing. Then the paper made some improvement and proposed a novel algorithm called EECH (energy efficient clustering hierarchy). Simulation results show the new proposed protocol EECH has outperformed LEACH on the lifetime of the networks.