Improvement in LEACH protocol for large-scale wireless sensor networks

As the use of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) has grown enormously in the past few decades, the need of scalable & energy efficient routing and data aggregation protocol for large-scale deployments has also risen. LEACH is a hierarchical clustering protocol that provides an elegant solution for such protocols. One deficiency that affects the performance of the protocol is existence of very large and very small clusters in the network at the same time. This leads to the decrease in lifetime of WSNs. In this paper, we propose and analyze a new energy efficient clustering protocol (FZ-LEACH) that eliminates the above problem by forming Far-Zone. Far-Zone is a group of sensor nodes which are placed at locations where their energies are less than a threshold. The simulation results and analysis show that proposed FZ-LEACH algorithm outperforms LEACH in terms of energy consumption and network lifetime.