EVALUATING PERFORMANCE OF LEFCA FOR INSIDE BS SITUATION IN WSNS

Abstract

WirelessSensor Networks (WSNs) are widely used for a great number of applications suchas earthquake measurements, fire rescue, environmental monitoring, health care,smart homes approximately for twenty years. Therefore, researchers still try todesign routing and MAC protocols for WSNs. In these studies, authors aim toimprove common performance metrics which are energy efficiency, throughput andnetwork lifetime by using several approaches. To achieve these improvementscommonly used scheme is clustering. Clustering provides equal load distributionin the network by decreasing communication distances of sensor nodes therebyenhances energy efficiency of the network. LEACH is a fundamental routingprotocol that forms clusters in a self-adaptive way to extend the lifetime ofthe network significantly. However, it has frequent cluster failures whichcause network disconnection. This issue can be very critical for vitalapplications such as fire rescue, health care schemes and earthquakemeasurements. As a result, we design low energy fixed clustering algorithm(LEFCA) to overcome these issues and prolong network lifetime of LEACH basedprotocols in a significant manner. In this paper, we aim to investigateperformance of LEFCA when base station (BS) is deployed into the sensor field.LEFCA is a fixed clustering algorithm which has threshold based cluster head(CH) determination approach as well as it has intelligent CH election processat the initialization of the protocol by the help of BS. In simulations, LEFCAis compared with LEACH and ModLEACH in terms of network lifetime, variation oftotal remaining energy and total data delivered to the BS for inside BSsituation. According to the results, LEFCA provides remarkable performanceimprovements when compared with LEACH based protocols.