A Novel Static Cluster-Based Hierarchical Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks have recently gained a lot of attention from the scientific community due to their very wide spectrum of applications. In such networks, the sensor nodes have limited resources. These constraints impose many challenges to the design of related protocols. Especially, routing protocols should be energy-efficient for the prolonged network lifetime. The LEACH protocol is the most popular energy-efficient hierarchical clustering protocol for WSNs that was proposed for reducing power consumption. However, LEACH suffers from several drawbacks such as the non uniform distribution of Cluster Head nodes, the possibility of choosing a low energy node as Cluster Head, etc. In this paper, an attempt is made to overcome this shortcoming by introducing a new hierarchical clustering protocol, called SCHP (Static Cluster-based Hierarchical Protocol). The SCHP protocol is based on a static cluster creation and an optimal cluster head selection. Simulation results show that the proposal guarantees better performance than the LEACH Protocol that is considered as the baseline in the literature. We used many metrics, as packet loss rate, end-to-end delay, and energy consumption to evaluate the efficiency of our proposal. We show also that the SCHP protocol can improve the network lifetime.