Abstract
The clustering technique is a key routing method for large-scale wireless sensor networks (WSNs), which strongly extends the network's lifetime and scalability. The fundamental protocol of this technique, which is called low energy adaptive clustering hierarchy (LEACH), is proved as a solution that offers good energy efficiency and consequently expands the network lifetime. As the energy efficiency is deteriorated with the network size, LEACH improvements are becoming so substantial to support the scalability in the large-scale WSNs. The authors propose a new dynamic multi-hop clustering protocol. It exploits both the mobility and the multi-hop communication to prolong the lifetime of the mobile WSN. The proposed protocol, called dynamic multi-hop LEACH (DMH-LEACH), combines the dynamic clustering, multi-hop transmissions, and node mobility to improve the energy efficiency of LEACH. They also study the effect of the traffic and energy heterogeneity on the proposed protocol. Finally, they simulate DMH-LEACH protocol for both homogeneous and heterogeneous scenarios. The simulation results show that the proposed protocol allows to better balance the energy consumption for all sensor nodes and considerably extends the network's lifetime.