Abstract
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are composed of many low cost, low power devices with sensing, local processing and wireless communication capabilities. Recent advances in wireless networks have led to many new protocols specifically designed for WSNs where energy awareness is an essential consideration. Most of the attention, however, has been given to the routing protocols since they might differ depending on the application and network architecture. Minimizing energy dissipation and maximizing network lifetime are important issues in the design of routing protocols for WSNs. In this paper, the low-energy adaptive clustering hierarchy (LEACH) routing protocol is considered and improved. We propose a clustering routing protocol named intra-balanced LEACH (IBLEACH), which extends LEACH protocol by balancing the energy consumption in the network. The simulation results show that IBLEACH outperforms LEACH and the existing improvements of LEACH in terms of network lifetime and energy consumption minimization.