ESCAL: An Energy-Saving Clustering Algorithm Based on LEACH

The application of wireless sensor network (WSN) is always restricted by the energy shortage of sensor nodes. In order to reduce the entire energy consumption of the WSN, a promising approach is to design light clustering algorithms. LEACH is such a well-known clustering algorithm that was designed to distribute the energy consumption to nodes in the WSN evenly. LEACH is characterized by its attractive cluster-based strategy; however, in the algorithm, energy dissipation of entire network is still great during the process that cluster-heads (CH) transmit data to base station (BS). In this paper, based on LEACH, we propose a modified clustering algorithm which is named ESCAL. In ESCAL, CHs won´t communicate with BS directly, but transfer aggregated data to the nearest node in term of received signal strength; then this selected nearest node will compress and forward the data to BS. According to this mechanism, the transmitting distance between CHs and the base station is greatly shortened, and therefore the energy dissipation of entire network will be remarkably reduced. Theoretical analysis and experimental simulation demonstrate that the energy dissipation of ESCAL is no more than half of that of LEACH.