A Heterogenous Clustering Protocol in WSN: HREF-LEACH Protocol

A WSN consists of spatially distributed autonomous energy-constraints sensor nodes. A no. of routing protocols are designed in this context. Clustering is one of the key techniques in wireless sensor network with less energy consumption. LEACH (Low Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy) [29]has been widely proposed in wireless sensor networks. ESEP (Extended Stable Election Protocol)saves better the energy consumption by making it heterogeneous taking 3-energy level nodes called advance, intermediate and normal. The advance node has more energy than intermediate and normal node. The probability of choosing cluster head depends on higher initial energy relative to other nodes as the energy drain rate is less in moderate and advanced nodes,extending lifetime of the network. The proposed HREF-LEACH protocol classifies the nodes into different types in term of their energy levels. The proposed scheme merges the idea of ESEP and LEACH protocol in which cluster heads are chosen based on sorting of remaining energies of nodes after each round. The simulation result shows that proposed protocol gives better performance than existing protocols using MATLAB against chosen performance metrics.