Virtual group leader election algorithm in distributed WSN

A distributed system is a collection of nodes interconnected by a communication network in which each node can work together and has its own local memory and other peripherals. The communications between the nodes are held by message passing over the communication network. An important challenge confronted in distributed wireless sensor network (WSN) is the adoption of suitable and efficient algorithms for leader election. The goal of a leader election in distributed WSN of autonomous nodes is to select one of the currently alive nodes as a leader so as to manage the coordination activities of the other nodes in the system. To the best of our knowledge most existing leader election algorithm have limitation either fault tolerance, message passing overhead or if the leader fails an election process could be initiated by communicating all the nodes in the distributed WSN. So, these types of algorithms have a great impact on the performance and the energy efficiency of the WSN because of communication overhead. To mitigate these type leader election limitations, in this paper, we propose a virtual group leader election algorithm by combining a group of nodes (including a master leader and multiple backups) on the WSN into a leader group. Our proposed algorithm improves the energy efficiency and the performance in message passing and less time complexity that results in electing a new leader node faster. The proposed algorithm analysed and validated through extensive mathematical results. And also the simulation result shows that the proposed algorithm can minimize a lot of energy when the number of nodes increases.