Distributed clustering protocol for wireless sensor network

Energy efficiency is the crucial issue in designing a wireless sensor network (WSN) system. One of the popular classical energy efficient protocols is hierarchically cluster-based low-energy adaptive clustering hierarchy (LEACH). In LEACH, the energy efficiency is improved and the stable time of the system is extended due to the rotations of the cluster-head of the network. However, to complete a cluster-head selection session, each node must be informed the total number of nodes and the number of clusters in the beginning of every round of communication. In this paper, this issue is solved by adding a scan procedure in the cluster set-up stage and checking the residual energy. The performance is evaluated by the number of surviving nodes over a period of network operation time. Simulation results prove that by pursuing the proposed protocol, improved stability can be achieved over the conventional schemes.