GICR: Global Information Based Clustering Routing Mechanism for Wireless Sensor Network

The energy efficiency is a very important feature for WSN (Wireless Sensor Network) routing protocol because of the energy limitation of nodes. In traditional LEACH protocol, a dynamic cluster head election algorithm (DCEA) is used in the phase of cluster head election phase. The number of cluster heads (CHs) elected in every round is not always optimal due to the irrational self-selected probability per round. As a result, the number of CHs elected per round is distributed in a large range around the pre-defined target value (optimal CH number), thus does not optimize the energy consumption of sensor nodes. This paper proposes the GICR protocol to solve this problem. It uses cooperation of the nodes in the phase of CH election to collect global information, it can eliminate the blindness of the election algorithm in the LEACH protocol thus enhance the cluster head election algorithm. The simulating result shows that the GICR economizes energies of nodes and prolongs the network´s life cycle compared with the LEACH protocol.