Heterogeneous LEACH Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks are networks of large number of tiny, battery powered sensor nodes having limited on-board storage, processing, and radio capabilities. Nodes sense and send their reports toward a processing center which is called base station. Since this transmission and reception process consumes lots of energy as compare to data processing, Designing protocols and applications for such networks has to be energy aware in order to prolong the lifetime of the network. Generally, real life applications deal with such Heterogeneity rather than Homogeneity. In this paper, a protocol is proposed, which is heterogeneous in energy. We analyze the basic distributed clustering routing protocol LEACH (Low Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy), which is a homogeneous system, and then we study the impact of heterogeneity in energy of nodes to prolong the life time of WSN. Simulation results using MATLAB shows that the proposed Leach-heterogeneous system significantly reduces energy consumption and increase the total lifetime of the wireless sensor network.