Abstract
Although wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been utilized for over one decade, it is now heavily used by many modern applications such as medical observance, disaster management and environmental monitoring. This type of network suffers from limited energy and a short lifetime in addition to the low channel bandwidth. Bandwidth represents the major challenges of such systems due to the great impact of communication cost on the consumption of nodes power. Clustering has been proven to be one of the best techniques to conserve the energy of WSNs. LEACH (low energy adaptive clustering hierarchy) protocol is one of the most fundamental works of WSN clustering. However, this protocol suffers from some drawbacks, especially in the setup phase where CH is selected randomly. This work aims to enhance LEACH by identifying a cluster head according to the lowest degree of consuming energy. The results clarify the ability of this work to enhance LEACH while prolonging the lifetime and improving the performance of WSN.