Design and Evaluation of En-LEACH Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Network

Abstract

A wireless network consisting of a large number of small sensors with low-power transceivers can be an effective tool for gathering data in a variety of environments like civil and military applications. The data collected by each sensor is communicated through the network to a single processing centre called base station that uses all reported data to determine characteristics of the environment or detect an event. Clustering sensors into groups, so that sensors communicate information only to local cluster-heads and then the cluster heads communicate the aggregated information to the processing center, may save a lot of energy. LEACH is clustering based protocol that utilizes randomized rotation of local cluster-heads to evenly distribute the energy load among the sensors in the network. LEACH uses localized coordination to enable scalability and robustness for dynamic networks, and incorporates data fusion into the routing protocol to reduce the amount of information that must be transferred to the base station. But LEACH is based on the assumption that each sensor nodes contain equal amount of energy which is not valid in real scenarios Enhanced LEACH protocol (En-LEACH) has been adaptable to handle non-uniform energy distribution characteristic of a dynamic sensor network.