Improvement of the Wireless Sensor Network Lifetime using LEACH with Vice-Cluster Head

A wireless sensor network (WSN) consists of large number of spatially distributed, wirelessly connected, self-governing sensor nodes, which are generally deployed in harsh environments. These sensor nodes need energy to sense, process and transmit information, but their energy is limited. Therefore, there is a need to design an energy efficient routing protocol to extend the lifetime of a WSN. In this paper, we propose a novel cluster based routing protocol called LEACH-VH, in which a new node type called Vice Cluster Head (VH) is introduced in addition to Cluster Head (CH). In a cluster, the node with the highest residual energy among all nodes is selected as the CH, and the node with second highest residual energy is selected by the CH as the VH, which serves as a backup node of the CH. The selected VH goes to sleep mode and, when the energy of the CH decreases below a low threshold value, say 10%, the VH wakes up to act as the CH and selects its VH. It has been demonstrated that the lifetime of a WSN increased up to 47% compared with LEACH (Low Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy) routing protocol.