Simulation Comparison of LEACH-Based Routing Protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Battery-powered nodes have limited energy reserves therefore applications and protocols used for WSNs, should be designed, concerning the optimized energy consumption in order to prolong the network lifetime. Data reception and transmission are the main energy consuming operations and they are regulated by the network layer, hence the routing protocol plays very important role in network optimization. In this paper information concerning the LEACH routing protocol is gathered and the classification of LEACH-based modifications is presented. Furthermore this paper focuses on improvements to the LEACH protocol that address problems of the cluster head selection, load balancing and lifetime enhancement as well as presents the simulation results for the selected group of LEACH-based protocols. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013.