Optimization of LEACH protocol for effective power utilization in Wireless Sensor Networks

Energy utilization of the sensor nodes is a major challenge that is being encountered in low-powered Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) when designing an algorithm, protocol or hardware. Based on the existing LEACH protocol, a new clustering protocol for wireless sensor networks is proposed and implemented in this paper. The outcome of this work is reduction in the energy consumption for sending the sensed data from sensor deployment place to the base station. In the existing LEACH protocol, cluster heads collect the data from sensors in the cluster and aggregate it. Then aggregated data is directly sent to the base station. But in our scheme, we differentiate the cluster heads which are far and near to the base station. Depending upon the distance the far node from the base station will send its aggregated data to the next neighbouring cluster head. Above cycle will be repeated until the entire data is delivered to the base station by its nearest cluster head.