A Modified E-LEACH Routing Protocol for Improving the Lifetime of a Wireless Sensor Network

Abstract

This paper proposes a modified end-to-end secure low energy adaptive clustering hierarchy (ME-LEACH) algorithm for enhancing the lifetime of a wireless sensor network (WSN). Energy limitations are a major constraint in WSNs, hence every activity in a WSN must efficiently utilize energy. Several protocols have been introduced to modulate the way a WSN sends and receives information. The end-to-end secure low energy adaptive clustering hierarchy (E-LEACH) protocol is a hierarchical routing protocol algorithm proposed to solve high-energy dissipation problems. Other methods that explore the presence of the most powerful nodes on each cluster as cluster heads (CHs) are the sparsity-aware energy efficient clustering (SEEC) protocol and an energy efficient clustering-based routing protocol that uses an enhanced cluster formation technique accompanied by the fuzzy logic (EERRCUF) method. However, each CH in the E-LEACH method sends data directly to the base station causing high energy consumption. SEEC uses a lot of energy to identify the most powerful sensor nodes, while EERRCUF spends high amounts of energy to determine the super cluster head (SCH). In the proposed method, a CH will search for the nearest CH and use it as the next hop. The formation of CH chains serves as a path to the base station. Experiments were conducted to determine the performance of the ME-LEACH algorithm. The results show that ME-LEACH has a more stable and higher throughput than SEEC and EERRCUF and has a 35.2% better network lifetime than the E-LEACH algorithm.