Reconfigurable Cluster Head Selection Protocol for Heterogeneous Wireless Sensors

Abstract

This work presents a study on the energy consumption of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) while collecting the environmental information from the associated nodes. The lifespan of these nodes is very short because of the limited availability of energy which has given rise to the significant challenge in designing an energy efficient routing protocol. In this paper, a new Reconfigurable Cluster Head Selection (RCH) protocol has been presented which has an innovative concept – reconfiguration of fixed Cluster Heads (CHs). The status ‘reconfigurable’ means that the network reconfigures itself by selecting new CH from among the normal nodes. This process is done when the available CH is about to die due to energy constraints.The proposed protocol maintains stability and prolonged duration of communication by selection of new CH within the cluster for securing the communication to meet an outage. Monte Carlo simulations are carried out in MATLAB and results show that because of the new proposed RCH protocol, the system is more energy efficient as compared with already available LEACH protocol.