BALANCED CLUSTERING MULTI-HOP ROUTING ALGORITHM FOR LEACH PROTOCOL IN WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS

LEACH protocol is one of the most popular cluster-based protocols, which has been widely proposed in wireless sensor network. To maintain balanced energy consumption, LEACH probabilistically rotates the role of cluster head among all the nodes. However, the performance of the LEACH protocol is far from optimal. To reduce the energy consumption and prolong the network lifetime, a balanced clustering multi-hop (BCM) routing algorithm is introduced in this paper. The BCM improves the method of choosing cluster head, makes the node that has the largest residual energy as the cluster head in next round and at the same time takes the communication radius and cluster size into account in cluster setup state. The multi-hop communication among cluster heads and intra-cluster cycle conception are also introduced in BCM, which improve communication mode from single hop to multi-hop between the cluster head and the sink, and keep the cluster structure unchanged in several rounds. Simulation results show that BCM results in more balanced cluster distribution, more efficient energy consumption, and compared with LEACH protocol, this algorithm consumes less power and has longer network lifetime.