Abstract
Wireless Sensor Network (WSNs) are collection of small Sensor Nodes (SNs) which are capable of performing multiple tasks such as data aggregation, processing and communication either to other SNs or to the Base Station (BS). As SNs are battery operated, so efficient utilization of energy during various operations in WSNs is one of the major issues which requires special attention. It has been observed in literature that Hierarchical clustering and the node heterogeneity are the two parameters by which the lifetime of WSNs can be enhanced. Keeping in view of the above, in this paper, we propose an Enhanced Heterogeneous LEACH (EHE-LEACH) Protocol for Lifetime Enhancement of SNs. A fixed distance based threshold is used for the bifurcation of direct communication and cluster based communication in the proposed scheme. SNs near to the BS communicate directly and those which are far away from the BS use cluster based communication. To evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme two key parameters known as: Half Nodes Alive (HNA) and Last Node Alive (LNA) are selected. By selecting the distance based threshold with the ratio of 1:9 between direct communication and cluster based communication it has been observed that EHE-LEACH has better network lifetime with respect to various parameters in comparison to the other well known proposals such as LEACH and SEP.