An efficient clustering protocol increasing wireless sensor networks life time

Due to their rapid and promising development, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have been predicted to invade all domains in our daily life in the near future. However in order to reach their maturity, researchers must find solution to some difficulties which are slowing down the wide spread use of these networks. These difficulties are inherent to their constrained specificities which require adapted solutions unrelated to classical wire networks. One the activity done by WSN that consumed the most energy is the number of packets sent/received. In order to reduce this number and to ensure WSN successful operation, hierarchical clustering protocols have been developed. In this paper, we present WB-TEEN and WBM-TEEN: two hierarchical routing protocols, based on nodes clustering and improving the well known protocol Threshold sensitive Energy Efficient sensor Network protocol (TEEN). This improvement is accomplished in a way such that each cluster is nodes balanced and the total energy consumption between sensor nodes and cluster heads is minimized by using multi-hops intra-cluster communication. Simulation results (using NS2 simulator) show that the proposed protocols exhibit better performance than Low Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy (LEACH) and TEEN in terms of energy consumption and network lifetime prolongation.