SummaryIn wireless sensor network, a large number of sensor nodes are distributed to cover a certain area. Sensor node is little in size with restricted processing power, memory, and limited battery life. Because of restricted battery power, wireless sensor network needs to broaden the system lifetime by reducing the energy consumption. A clustering-based protocols adapt the use of energy by giving a balance to all nodes to become a cluster head. In this paper, we concentrate on a recent hierarchical routing protocols, which are depending on LEACH protocol to enhance its performance and increase the lifetime of wireless sensor network. So our enhanced protocol called Node Ranked-LEACH is proposed. Our proposed protocol improves the total network lifetime based on node rank algorithm. Node rank algorithm depends on both path cost and number of links between nodes to select the cluster head of each cluster. This enhancement reflects the real weight of specific node to success and can be represented as a cluster head. The proposed algorithm overcomes the random process selection, which leads to unexpected fail for some cluster heads in other LEACH versions, and it gives a good performance in the network lifetime and energy consumption comparing with previous version of LEACH protocols.
KEYWORDScluster head selection, clustering-based protocols, LEACH protocols, wireless sensor networks
| INTRODUCTIONWireless sensor networks (WSNs) consider a base station (BS) that communicates with countless of wireless sensor nodes by means of a radio channel. Data transmission and reception process are the major operations that consume power in WSN. Elimination of redundant data is important issue in WSN, because multiple nodes may sense the same overlapped area. This action will reduce the overall power consumption and use the bandwidth usage.Routing protocols in WSNs can be divided according to network structure into 3 categories: location based, data centric, and hierarchical protocols. 1,2 Location-based protocol: location information for all nodes is a major cornerstone during data communication. Energy consumption during data transmission depends on the target position distance. Data are sent not only to the target area but also to whole sensors network, which is known as flooding. Residual energy is not considered for each node, so many nodes will run out of energy, which leads at the end to an accumulative data transmission failure. [3][4][5] Data-centric protocol 6 : data transmission from sensor node to the BS through intermediate nodes. The intermediate node may not have interest in the data it receives-it is known as relay node in this case. This process reduces the number of packet sent from source to the sink, which leads to reduce the power consumption.