Improvement of energy consumption and load balance for LEACH in Wireless Sensors Networks

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is a promising approach for a variety of applications. Because of limitation of energy resource, memory space and processing capability of sensor nodes, it is very difficult to implement IP-based routing protocols in WSN. Recently, many research focus on developing special routing protocols for WSNs with the main design criteria: energy efficiency, load balance and reliability. The most well known routing protocol class is hierarchical which divides network into many clusters. Each cluster is represented by a cluster head (CH) that is responsible for receiving data from all non-CH members, aggregating these data and sending to the base station (BS). In order to balance energy consumption of the entire network, CHs are not fixed but rotated. Therefore, the hierarchical protocols can decrease and balance the energy consumption and prolong network lifetime. LEACH is one of the first cluster-based for WSN, which includes distributed cluster formation. In this paper, we propose a new hierarchical routing protocol (called EL-LEACH: Energy and Load balance LEACH) which achieves energy efficiency and load balance. Our simulation result shows that our new scheme EL-LEACH achieves better energy consumption, load balance and network life time than other well known LEACH protocols.