Enhancing the performance of LEACH protocol in wireless sensor networks

LEACH protocol is one of the clustering routing protocols in wireless sensor networks. The advantage of LEACH is that each node has the equal probability to be a cluster head, which makes the energy dissipation of each node be relatively balanced. In LEACH protocol, time is divided into many rounds, in each round, all the nodes contend to be cluster head according to a predefined criterion. This paper focuses on how to set the time length of each round, to prolong the lifetime of the network and increase throughput, which is denoted as the amount of data packs sent to the sink node. The functions of lifetime and throughput related to the time length of each round are deduced. These functions can be used to enhance the performance of cluster-based wireless sensor networks in terms of lifetime and throughput.