Performance Comparison of Typical and Improved LEACH Protocols in Wireless Sensor Network

Wireless sensor network (WSN) is a collection of mobile or fixed sensor nodes, where sensor nodes can communicate with each other or the base station (BS) to transmit the necessary information for different applications. The energy of the nodes is constrained and non-replaceable, which leads to design energy efficient protocols to extend the lifetime of WSN, such as the well-known Low Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy (LEACH) protocol and the improved LEACH protocols. In this paper, LEACH, LEACH-C, TEEN and DEEC are simulated and compared to figure out the suitable application environment for them. Simulation is divided into two parts. The first part of simulation focuses on the discussion of the best percentage of nodes selected to be the cluster-heads. In addition, the location of BS inside or outside of the network has significant influence on the performances of different protocols. The second part of the simulation shows the performances of the number of sensors still alive, number of data signals received by BS and total energy dissipation in four different protocols.