Study and Implementation of Leach (Low Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy) Protocol in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Network is the network of power-limited sensing devices called sensors. Wireless sensor network is differ from other networks in terms of optimization of amount of energy because when these sensors sense and transmit data to other sensors present in the network, considerable amount of energy is dissipated.WSNs are used in various domains such as military applications, medical ,engineering and industrial task automation. It is very important to have an optimal network in order to use its processing power at maximum. However, there are still some fundamental challenges that need to be overcome in the design of the next generation of wireless sensor networks. The sensor nodes present in the wireless sensor networks are constrained of energy as they are powered with the help of battery. Due to energy limitations there is a great need of providing any energy efficient way of communication for the wireless sensor networks. Unlike its significant advancements in many areas; maximizing the lifetime of the whole network remains a major hindrance. Various protocols and approaches have been into existence to overcome this pitfall. We propose LEACH protocol, a protocol to prolong the time interval before the death of the first node (we refer to as stability period).It is based on weighted election probabilities of each node to become cluster head according to the remaining energy in each node. We found that it yields longer stability region for higher values of extra energy brought by more powerful nodes.