Variants of LEACH Routing Protocol in WSN: A Comparative Analysis

摘要

Wireless Sensor Networks are regarded as significant developments of 21st century and have gained worldwide attention due to their intensive use in surveillance systems, medical, home and military operations. The sensor nodes are deployed in extremely large number in these networks to enable reliable surveillance and effective monitoring of environment. In recent years, most of the researchers have shown interest in designing energy efficient protocols for gathering essential data from the environment. This is because sensor nodes are battery operated which depletes quickly with each operation. Cluster-based protocols are known to provide better results than other routing protocols in terms of resilience, energy efficiency, data integration and scalability. In this paper, we discuss the most effective hierarchical clustering protocol called as LEACH (Low Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy) along with its issues and drawbacks. An exhaustive search on variants of LEACH protocol has been conducted. We present the taxonomy of various descendants of LEACH protocol and compare their performances based on metrics such as scalability, data aggregation, mobility etc.