Op-LEACH: An Optimized LEACH Method for Busty Traffic in WSNs

A Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is a collection of small, self-contained electro-mechanical devices that monitor the environment conditions. There are many design issues for WSNs such as deployment, mobility, infrastructure, network topology, network size and density, connectivity, lifetime, node addressability, data aggregation etc. The hierarchical routing protocols are LEACH (Low-Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy) is one of the routing protocols designed for communication in WSNs. LEACH is clustering based protocol that utilizes randomized rotation of local cluster-heads to evenly distribute the energy load among the sensors in the network. LEACH uses localized coordination to enable scalability and robustness for dynamic networks, and incorporates data fusion into the routing protocol to reduce the amount of information that must be transferred to the base station. But LEACH is based on the assumption that each sensor nodes contain equal amount of energy which is not valid in real scenarios. LEACH uses a TDMA based MAC protocol, in order to maintain balanced energy consumption. A number of these TDMA slots are wasted when the nodes have random data distribution. A modification to existing LEACH protocol is needed in order to use the slots corresponding to nodes that do not have data to send at its scheduled slot. This paper presents a new version of LEACH protocol called OP-LEACH which aims to reduce energy consumption within the wireless sensor network. Both existing LEACH and proposed OP-LEACH are evaluated through extensive simulations using OMNET++ simulator which shows that Op-LEACH performs better than LEACH protocol.