Efficient Cluster Head Selection Methods for Wireless Sensor Networks

[[abstract]]A WSN (Wireless Sensor Network) consists of over hundreds of sensor nodes which have limited energy, process capability and memory. The applications of WSN in some extreme environment make sensor nodes difficult to replace once they use up the battery resource. Since the wireless transmission is the most energy consuming operation, how to design an energy efficient routing protocol becomes the main goal for the wireless sensor network. LEACH is considered as the most popular routing protocol which has better performance in saving the energy consumption. However, the selecting formula neglecting the change of nodes’ energy will make the nodes acting as cluster heads too many times which leads to the death of the cluster head early by consuming excessive amount of energy. Also, the frequent reclustering wastes certain amount of energy. This paper presents a new version of LEACH protocol referred to as VLEACH which aims to reduce energy consumption within the wireless network