An Enhanced Cluster-Based Routing Algorithm for Energy Conservation in Wireless Sensor Networks.

Abstract

It has been well established that the lifetime of a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) depends on the energy of the sensor nodes which is limited by the battery of the nodes. This challenge has led to research efforts towards developing a more efficient energy based routing algorithms and architectures. One of such popular algorithm is the Low-Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy (LEACH). The LEACH approach adopts randomized rotation of local base stations (or cluster-heads (CH)) to evenly distribute energy load amongst the sensors in the network. A variant of LEACH known as Vice-LEACH (V-LEACH) introduces the concept of a vice-CH that takes over the role of the main CH in the event of CH death. Both LEACH and V-LEACH ignores node’s residual energy and the fact that optimal number CH is not constant in all the rounds. This paper proposes an improved version of V-LEACH which selects the optimal number of CHs at the network initialization, divides the network into optimal number of sectors, and then initializes the network with one node as CH in each sector. This Algorithm considers the node's residual energy while maintaining the optimal number of CHs throughout the network lifetime. It is envisaged that this approach will improve the performance of the network compared with LEACH and the typical V-LEACH.f cluster head is not ensured in all rounds.