Routing protocol

Electrical engineering

Computer network

Wireless Routing Protocol

Structural engineering

Base station

Distributed computing

Engineering

Wireless sensor network

Hierarchical routing

Zone Routing Protocol

Efficient energy use

Energy consumption

Computer science

Routing (electronic design automation)

Node (physics)

Sensors

Cluster-based hierarchical routing protocols play an essential role in decreasing the energy consumption of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). A low-energy adaptive clustering hierarchy (LEACH) has been proposed as an application-specific protocol architecture for WSNs. However, without considering the distribution of the cluster heads (CHs) in the rotation basis, the LEACH protocol will increase the energy consumption of the network. To improve the energy efficiency of the WSN, we propose a novel modified routing protocol in this paper. The newly proposed improved energy-efficient LEACH (IEE-LEACH) protocol considers the residual node energy and the average energy of the networks. To achieve satisfactory performance in terms of reducing the sensor energy consumption, the proposed IEE-LEACH accounts for the numbers of the optimal CHs and prohibits the nodes that are closer to the base station (BS) to join in the cluster formation. Furthermore, the proposed IEE-LEACH uses a new threshold for electing CHs among the sensor nodes, and employs single hop, multi-hop, and hybrid communications to further improve the energy efficiency of the networks. The simulation results demonstrate that, compared with some existing routing protocols, the proposed protocol substantially reduces the energy consumption of WSNs.

An Improved Energy-Efficient Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks