International Journal of Scientific Research Engineering & Technology (IJSRET), ISSN 2278 0882

Volume 3, Issue 4, July 2014

An improved protocol for Energy efficient communication in Wireless

Sensor Network
Aman Deep Singh1, Mr Nirendra Kumar2
MTech (CS) BSACET MATHURA, UP, INDIA
2
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR (CS) BSACET MATHURA, UP, INDIA
1

ABSTRACT
The popularity of Wireless Sensor Networks has
increased extremely due to the huge potential of the
sensor networks to join the physical world with the
virtual world. Since these devices depend on battery
power and may be placed in hostile environments
replacing them becomes a tedious task. Thus, increasing
the energy of these networks becomes important. Our
paper provides methods for clustering and cluster head
selection to WSN to improve energy efficiency. It
provides a comparative study of the different methods on
the basis of the network lifetime. It provides a modified
approach for cluster head selection with good
performance and less computational complexity. In
addition it also proposes modified communication
protocol as an algorithm for clustering of WSN which
would result in improved performance with faster
convergence.
Keywords: Battery lifetime, cluster head, sensor nodes,
leach, throughput.

WSN have attracted tremendous attention of the research

community in recent years and a vast amount of research
work has been conducted solve the practical and
theoretical issues. This has resulted in a surge of civil
and military applications over the last few years. Today,
most deployed WSNs measure scalar physical
phenomenon line temperature, pressure, humidity, or
location of objects [5]. In general, most sensor networks
are designed for delay-tolerant and low-bandwidth
applications. For this reason most research on sensor
networks has concentrated on this low-power and delaytolerant network paradigm, which is referred as
terrestrial sensor networks.
WSNs were originally motivated by military
applications, which range from large-scale acoustic
surveillance systems for ocean surveillance to small
networks of unattended ground sensors for ground target
detection [1]. However, the availability of low-cost
sensors and wireless communication has promised the
development of a wide range of applications in both
civilian and military fields.

1. INTRODUCTION
The WSN system has witnessed a tremendous upsurge
coming along with numerous applications, e.g., battle
field surveillance, environment monitoring, disaster
detection and rescue, biodiversity and habitat
monitoring, precise and intelligent agriculture, medicine
and health care, environment-friendly buildings, and
logistics. WSN can prevent grape plants from overheating or freezing and thus considerably increase the
plant value and the wine quality [4]. Another WSN
application serves livestock farming by attaching to each
livestock a sensor node which measures and reports the
animals health status, e.g., the body temperature and
any pest infection, farmers can be alerted to react in time
to any potential disease outbreak in the herd.
In view of application diversity, it is difficult to set up a
one-for-all node hardware framework and a standard
communication protocol stacks that application. [6]

1.1 PROTOCOLS FOR WSN

Low Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy
(LEACH) LEACH (Low Energy Adaptive Clustering
Hierarchy) is made for sensor networks where an end
user desires to remotely monitor the environment. [2] In
such a condition, the data from the individual nodes
must be sent to a central base station, often placed far
from the sensor network, through which the end-user can
retrieve the data. There are several desirable properties
for protocols on these networks:

Use 100's - 1000's of nodes

Maximize system lifetime
Maximize network coverage
Use uniform, battery-operated nodes

Conventional network protocols, such as direct

transmission, minimum transmission energy, multi-hop

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International Journal of Scientific Research Engineering & Technology (IJSRET), ISSN 2278 0882
Volume 3, Issue 4, July 2014

routing and clustering all have shortcomings that don't

allow them to get all the desirable properties. LEACH
has distributed cluster formation, local processing to
decrease global communication, and randomized
rotation of the cluster-heads. Together, these features
permits LEACH to get the desired properties. Initial
simulations depicts that LEACH is an energy-efficient
protocol that makes larger system lifetime.
Hybrid Energy-Efficient Distributed Clustering
(HEED)
Nodes in LEACH independently resolve to become
cluster heads. While this approach demands no
communication overhead, it has the flaws of not
guaranteeing that the cluster head nodes are well
distributed all the way through the network.[9] While the
LEACH-C protocol finds an answer to this problem, it is
a
centralized approach that cant scale to very big
numbers of sensors. HEED applies an iterative cluster
formation algorithm, where sensors assigns themselves a
cluster head probability that is a function of their
residual energy and a communication cost that is a
function of neighbor proximity.
Linked cluster algorithm In the Linked Cluster
Algorithm, a node becomes the cluster-head if it has the
highest identity among all within one hop of itself or
among all nodes within one hop of one of its neighbors
[6]. This algorithm was improved by the LCA2
algorithm, which generates a smaller number of clusters.
The LCA2 algorithm elects as a cluster-head the node
with the lowest id among all nodes that are neither a
cluster-head nor are within 1-hop of the already chosen
cluster-heads.
Sensor Protocol for Information via Negotiation
(SPIN)
SPIN is a protocol that was designed to enable datacentric information dissemination in sensor networks.
Rather than blindly broadcasting sensor data all the way
through the network, nodes receiving or generating data
first advertise this data through short ADV messages.
The ADV messages simply composed of an applicationspecific meta-data description of the data itself. This
meta-data can describe such aspects as the type of data
and the location of its origin.
Energy-Efficient Hierarchical Clustering (EEHC)
Another significant probabilistic clustering algorithm
was earlier proposed in Ref. [10](Energy Efficient
Hierarchical ClusteringEEHC). The main objective of
this algorithm was to address the shortcomings of one-

hop random selection algorithms such as LEACH by

extending the cluster architecture to multiple hops.[8] It
is a distributed, k-hop hierarchical clustering algorithm
aiming at the maximization of the network lifetime.
Initially, each sensor node is elected as a CH with
probability p and announces its election to the
neighboring nodes within its communication range. The
above CHs are now called the volunteer CHs. Next, all
the nodes that are within k-hops distance from a
volunteer CH, are supposed to receive the election
message either directly or through intermediate
forwarding. Consequently, any node that receives such
CH election message and is not itself a CH, becomes a
member of the closest cluster. Additionally, a number of
forced CHs are elected from nodes that are neither CHs
nor belong to a cluster. Specifically, if the election
messages do not reach a node within a preset time
interval t, the node becomes a forced CH assuming
that it is not within k hops of all volunteer CHs.

2. LEACH ALGORITHM OPERATION

The operation of LEACH is broken up into rounds,
where each round starts with a setup phase, when the
clusters are arranged systematically, followed by a
steady state phase, when data moves to the base station
occur. In order to reduce overhead, the steady-state
phase is long compared to the set-up phase. The process
of it is shown in Figure 1

At the stage of cluster forming, a node randomly picks a

number between 0 to 1, compared this number to the
threshold values t(n) if the number is less than t(n) then
it become cluster head in this round, else it become
common node. Threshold t(n) is determined by the
following:

Where p is the percentage of the cluster head nodes in all

nodes, r is the number of the round; G is the collections

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International Journal of Scientific Research Engineering & Technology (IJSRET), ISSN 2278 0882
Volume 3, Issue 4, July 2014

usage over multiple nodes, the cluster-head nodes are

not fixed; rather, this position is self-elected at different
time intervals. Thus a set C of nodes might elect
themselves cluster-heads at time t1, but at time t1 + d a
new set C0 of nodes elect themselves as cluster-heads.
The decision to become a cluster-head depends on the
amount of energy left at the node.
In this way, nodes with more energy remaining will
perform the the energy-intensive functions of the
network.
100

Percent of Allive Nodes

of the nodes that have not yet been head nodes in the
first 1/P rounds. Using this threshold, all nodes will be
able to be head nodes after 1/P rounds. The analysis is as
follows: Each node becomes a cluster head with
probability p when the round begins, the nodes which
have been head nodes in this round will not be head
nodes in the next 1/P rounds, because the number of the
nodes which is capable of head node will gradually
reduce, so, for these remain nodes, the probability of
being head nodes must be increased. After 1/P-1 round,
all nodes which have not been head nodes will be
selected as head nodes with probability 1, when 1/P
rounds finished, all nodes will return to the same starting
line. When clusters have formed, the nodes start to
transmit the inspection data. Cluster heads receive data
was sent to the gateway after fused. . This is a frame data
transmission.
In order to reduce unnecessary energy cost, steady stage
is composed of multiple frames and the steady stage is
much longer than the set-up stage.
New improved algorithm vs LEACH:
LEACH (Low-Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy), a
clustering-based protocol that minimizes energy
dissipation in sensor networks was developed, there after
we modified the clustering head selection and faster
convergence is achieved

3. Simulation and Results for LEACH

100

Proposed
LEACH

90

80
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0

50

60

45

50

40

40

35

30
20
10

500

1000

1500

2000

2500

1000

1500

2000

2500

3000

The above figure is the comparison between Leach and

Modified Leach that we proposed, the no. of nodes will
alive for the more time in comparison to leach and the
proposed method improves the efficiency of the battery
of the sensor nodes which eventually results in improved
life time of the sensor nodes.Being cluster-head drains
the battery of that node

70

500

rounds

Energy

Dead

80

Proposed
LEACH

90

Proposed
LEACH

30
25
20
15

3000

rounds

10
5

The above figure is the comparison between Leach and

Modified Leach that we proposed, the no. of nodes will
dead for the lesser time in comparison to leach and the
proposed method improves the efficiency of the battery
of the sensor nodes which eventually results in improved
life time of the sensor nodes.Being cluster-head drains
the battery of that node. In order to spread this energy

500

1000

1500

2000

2500

3000

rounds
The above figure shows the amount of energy dissipated
using Modified LEACH versus LEACH as the network
diameter is increased and the electronics energy varies.

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International Journal of Scientific Research Engineering & Technology (IJSRET), ISSN 2278 0882
Volume 3, Issue 4, July 2014

This figure shows the large energy savings achieved

using LEACH for most of the parameter space. In
addition to reducing energy waste, LEACH successfully
distributes energy-usage among the nodes in the network
such that the nodes die randomly and at the same rate.
The above figure is the Energy Efficiency between
Leach and Modified Leach that we proposed, the no. of
nodes in modified leach will alive for the more time in
comparison to leach and the proposed method improves
the efficiency of the battery of the sensor nodes which
eventually results in improved life time of the sensor
nodes.Being cluster-head drains the battery of that node.
In order to spread this energy usage over multiple nodes,
the cluster-head nodes are not fixed; rather, this position
is self-elected at different time intervals

of each of the clustering methods. In this work, we

divide the network into logical regions. Each region use
different communication hierarchy. Two regions use
direct communication.
In this work, we divide the network into logical regions.
Each region use different communication hierarchy. Two
regions use direct communication topology and two
regions are further sub-divided into clusters and use
multi-hop communication hierarchy. Each node in a
region elects itself as a CH independent of other region.
This technique encourages better distribution of CHs in
the network. Simulation results show that our proposed
protocol performs well compared to LEACH. In this
work, we study the three performance metrics: Network
lifetime, throughput and residual energy.

10

x 10

Throughput

Limitation: Wireless Sensor Network cannot be

implemented where large power is required to drive the
system, also the charging of the nodes is difficult as it is
driven by the battery and can be utilized once to get the
information from the field rest we need to replace all the
sensor nodes with new to again getting the information
from the field.

Proposed
LEACH

7
6
5
4
3
2
1
0

500

1000

1500

2000

2500

3000

rounds
The above figure shows that Modified LEACH more
than doubles the useful system lifetime compared with
the alternative approaches. While these simulations do
not account for the setup time to configure the dynamic
clusters (nor do they account for any necessary routing
start-up costs or updates as nodes die), they give a good
first order approximation of the lifetime extension we
can achieve using LEACH.

4. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE SCOPE

Our paper work included the study of clustering, cluster
head selection and other energy efficient communication
protocols for WSN, since it was earlier put forward that
clustering improves the network lifetime. We used
modified approach for cluster head choosing and
proposed a new method for cluster head selection having
less computational complexity. It was also found that the
modified approach has identical performance to that of
the fuzzy logic based approach. For the purpose of
clustering a WSN GA, K-Means algorithms were used
and a new method of clustering WSN was proposed. We
used LEACH as a reference to compare the performance

Future Scope
The modified algorithm for clustering of WSN has the
scope of giving better results if the algorithm parameters
are chosen suitably. The modified cluster head selection
technique may give better results if implemented with
other clustering techniques which have not been
discussed in the thesis (eg: Fuzzy C-Mean
clustering).The network lifetime may also be improved
if the clustering algorithms are made distributed as in
LEACH. In all of the methods discussed above the
energy parameter is taken into consideration only during
cluster head selection considering energy as as a
parameter during clustering itself.
Also in future it can be possible to deploy the solar cells
in order to increase the energy of the system and
eventually the network lifetime will also improve.
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[2] C.S. Raghavendra, K. M. Sivalingam, and T.

Znatil, 2004,Wireless sensor networks, Boston
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International Journal of Scientific Research Engineering & Technology (IJSRET), ISSN 2278 0882
Volume 3, Issue 4, July 2014

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