JoWUA

Abstract

Hierarchical clustered routing protocols have an important role in reducing the energy consumption in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). For WSNs, Low-energy adaptive clustering hierarchy (LEACH) architecture is used as one of the application-specific protocols. However, if the cluster heads (CHs) distribution is not considered in rotation basis, the network energy consumption in the LEACH protocol increases. In this paper, we propose a novel average energy, residual energy based modified LEACH (aerem-LEACH) routing protocol for improving the energy efficiency of the WSN. In the proposed approach, the average energy of the networks and the residual node energy are simultaneously considered for routing to reduce power consumption. In this novel aerem-LEACH approach the sensor nodes which are closer to the base station (BS) are prohibited to join in cluster formation to reduce energy consumption of sensor nodes, and a new threshold is used in the proposed approach for election of CHs among all the sensor nodes. The proposed aerem-LEACH routing scheme also employs single hop, multi-hop, and hybrid communications for further improvement in the energy efficiency of the networks. The simulation result demonstrates that there is substantial reduction in the energy consumption of WSNs with the proposed aerem-LEACH routing scheme as compared to that with other state of art existing routing protocols namely, Stable Energy Efficient Network (SEEN), Energy Efficient LEACH (EE LEACH), Optical LEACH (O-LEACH), LEACH-Mobile (LEACH-M), LEACH-Centralized (LEACH-C), and LEACH for small-scale as well as large-scale sensor field.