An Energy-Aware Adaptive Clustering Protocol for Sensor Networks

This paper presents a new communication protocol for sensor networks which is based on and is an enhancement over the LEACH protocol proposed by Heinzelman et al. The proposed protocol is based on adaptive clustering of the sensor nodes, the nodes with the maximum amount of residual energies being selected as the cluster-heads. This is in contrast with the original LEACH protocol which employs a simple randomized rotation of the cluster-heads. We define a new eligibility criterion for the selection of cluster-heads and introduce data-acknowledgements, advertisement updates and cluster-head reselection to make the protocol robust against node and channel failures. We will show how the utilization of these measures improves the system lifetime and reduces the data losses. With the use of the proposed protocol, the system life is increased by three times as compared to that obtained by using the LEACH protocol. Also, the percentage data loss is reduced by around twenty times.