Abstract
Wireless Sensor Network applications profit from or necessitate the use of leaders, elected on the basis of some quantifiable and comparable criteria. Hence, a panoply of leader election algorithms have been proposed in the literature. Even though most of the algorithms focus on lowering the control message (messages needed to elect a leader) count, there has been almost no focus on ensuring high availability of a leader despite various types of failures like battery exhaustion and sensor crash, especially, in the scenarios of rescue and warfare, where the absence of the leader, even for a short duration, may lead to havoc. To overcome the problem of electing a unique leader, in this paper, we propose an efficient protocol for electing k-leaders in a wireless sensor network. The proposed protocol, called SEALEA for A Scalable Leader Election protocol, is distributed and, by means of the exchange of messages among neighbors, terminates after informing the elected nodes. The correctness of the protocol is proven through simulation. SEALEA is implemented on the OMNET++ simulator. Our experimental evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of SEALEA in determining network leaders swiftly and efficiently. The performance of SEALEA is compared to that of other previously proposed k-leaders election protocols WiLE [1] and K-Top Leader [2]. Results show that SEALEA determines the leader faster and consuming less energy than previous solutions. On average, SEALEA is shown to send 0.845% of the messages sent by WiLE, transmitting 0.87% of the bytes transmitted by that protocol. Against K-TOP, SEALEA sends 19.25% of the messages and transmits only 19.28% of the bytes transmitted by K-TOP.