Abstract:

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are widely used for a great number of applications such as earthquake measurements, fire rescue, environmental monitoring, health care, smart homes approximately for twenty years. Therefore, researchers still try to design routing and MAC protocols for WSNs. In these studies, authors aim to improve common performance metrics which are energy efficiency, throughput and network lifetime by using several approaches. To achieve these improvements commonly used scheme is clustering. Clustering provides equal load distribution in the network by decreasing communication distances of sensor nodes thereby enhances energy efficiency of the network. LEACH is a fundamental routing protocol that forms clusters in a self-adaptive way to extend the lifetime of the network significantly. However, it has frequent cluster failures which cause network disconnection. This issue can be very critical for vital applications such as fire rescue, health care schemes and earthquake measurements. As a result, we design low energy fixed clustering algorithm (LEFCA) to overcome these issues and prolong network lifetime of LEACH based protocols in a significant manner. In this paper, we aim to investigate performance 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 process at the initialization of the protocol by the help of BS. In simulations, LEFCA is compared with LEACH and ModLEACH in terms of network lifetime, variation of total remaining energy and total data delivered to the BS for inside BS situation. According to the results, LEFCA provides remarkable performance improvements when compared with LEACH based protocols. 

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