Enhanced TL-LEACH routing protocol for large-scale WSN applications

Routing sensor data from sensor node to base station is a challenging task in a wireless sensor network (WSN) application. The sensor nodes have a number of constraints such as limited energy, low memory, processing capabilities, etc. It is important to consider these constraints while designing a routing protocol so that the overall network lifetime and the data robustness may be efficiently maintained. This research focuses on improving the Two-Level Hierarchy for Low Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy (TL-LEACH) protocol to provide energy efficiency; in terms of communication overhead and making the communication among the end-nodes, cluster-heads and base station as robust as possible. Two major drawbacks of the TL-LEACH protocol have been focused in this research that are mainly related to using the protocol for large-scale WSN and making the communication among the nodes robust. A novel cluster-head selection mechanism has been introduced to improve the energy-efficiency of the TL-LEACH and the new version has been named as Extended TL-LEACH (ETL-LEACH). The simulation results show that the ETL-LEACH performs better in terms of energy consumption, node lifetime and the communication delay has been decreased to a significant amount.