An energy-efficient LEACH algorithm for wireless sensor networks

With limited battery power of nodes, communication energy consumption is the main factor to affect the lifetime of wireless sensor networks. It is of great significance to design a communication protocol to prolong the lifetime of the networks. In this paper, an energy-efficient LEACH algorithm for wireless sensor networks is proposed, which takes the energy and position factors of each node into account to optimize the cluster head election and data transmission mode. This method introduces the current energy and position factors of the node into the threshold to further reduce the randomness of the cluster head's designation. In the data transmission stage, some of the neighboring cluster heads are dedicated to be selected as the relay nodes to make the communication energy consumption balanced. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm has higher stability and longer lifetime of the network compared to LEACH and LEACH-C algorithms.