Enhancement of Dual-Hop Layered LEACH Routing Protocol with Mobility in Wireless Sensor Networks

One of the most important challenges in a Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is to enhance energy utilization and also the network lifetime. The routing protocol falls into two categories: Flat routing protocol and hierarchical routing protocol. The LEACH (Low Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy) protocol selects cluster head in every cluster to distribute the energy load among the member nodes within the network. DL-LEACH (Dual-Hop Layered LEACH) protocol is proposed for two-level cluster head selection in the network. In a level-one cluster, the cluster head election process is done within each cluster based on energy. The Cluster Head (CH) and member nodes are statically deployed within the network and the mobility is not considered. The proposed method is enhancing DL-LEACH protocol by using mobility factor at level-two cluster head selection. If the cluster head energy is low at the level-two cluster, the random mobility process is performed. The highest energy node is elected as a cluster head in both inter-cluster and in the new cluster that the node visited. The residual energy of nodes and distance are considered as metrics to select a member node as a cluster head. The simulation results of the proposed protocol are compared with the LEACH protocol using the NS2 simulator and results prove that proposed work outperforms in terms of network lifetime and lower the energy consumption.