Research on the optimal number of cluster heads of wireless sensor networks based on Multihop-LEACH

LEACH protocol was first proposed as a low-power adaptive hierarchical routing algorithm for wireless sensor networks, which lay a foundation for most scholars who study the hierarchical routing protocols. The majority of studies are based on the condition that the number of cluster heads is fixed and the base station is far away from the monitored area which is not suited for the situation when the base station is located at the center of area or when cluster head multi-hops mechanism was introduced into LEACH protocol. The number of cluster head is one of the key factors of influencing the performance of clustering network, so it´s worth to do some research on this aspect. In this paper, an expression is given to define the optimal number of cluster heads based on Multihop-LEACH which was verified by simulation. Theory and simulation show that the expression can be more accurate to calculate the optimal number of cluster heads under high network density.