Improvement of LEACH Protocol: W-LEACH Approach

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are autonomous, self-configurable and self-organizing embedded systems designed to provide innovative services. Their use is growing in several fields, such as military, environment, medicine, etc. The energy consumed by sensor nodes presents a major challenge in this type of network, since they have a limited lifetime. For this reason, several routing protocols have been designed, in particular W-LEACH protocol [6]. W-LEACH is an improved version of LEACH protocol [8]. The purpose of our paper is to highlight the improvements made by W-LEACH protocol, through a development stage under MATLAB language, simulation step of LEACH and W-LEACH protocols and finally a summary results validating the improvements in terms of lifetime claimed by W-LEACH designers.