Extending the Lifetime of Wireless Sensor Networks using an Improved Clustering Protocol

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is one of the underlying mechanics of IoT (Internet-of-Things) which has recently seen a worldwide interest by its use in several domains as military, automation, agriculture, environment, underwater and etc. Energy efficiency and reliability of transmitted messages are two of the major requirements for the surveillance and wireless detection applications in WSN. For this reason, a growing number of research studies are carried out. Several routing protocols have been developed to furnish better performance for optimizing the network's energy consumption in WSN; most of them are based in clustering and hierarchical topology. However, most of these routing protocols cannot consider all required and important metrics to increase the lifespan of the network. This work introduces an enhanced algorithm of the Low Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy (LEACH) protocol called Balanced Current Energy-LEACH (BCE-LEACH) which aims to equity the power consumption of sensor nodes of the network due to extend the lifetime of the network. The proposed protocol is based on the residual energy of sensor nodes to pick out cluster heads (CHs) that means only nodes with sufficient current energy can participate in CH selection, and then it is focused on both current energy and the distance toward the base station (BS) to select a parent CH which has current energy greater than the mean energy of CHs and the distance to the BS is fewer than the average. This parent CH groups all data from other CHs. The root CH after doing data aggregation sends compressed information to the BS using the multi-hop process between CHs. The improved algorithm is simulated in MATLAB R2016b simulation tool. Simulation results in this paper indicate that the introduced protocol works better than LEACH through extending the lifetime of the WSN.