Performance Evaluation of LEACH Protocol for Wireless Sensor Network in a Mobile Environment

Recent advances in VLSI and Micro-Electro-Mechanical (MEM) devices have led to the development of Wireless Sensor Networks, where energy awareness is an essential consideration. Many new protocols have been developed in order to extend the network lifetime by saving some battery power. However, most of the attention has given to the routing protocols as it differs depending on the Network application and architecture. Typically, sensors are deployed in a hazardous environment to gather the data periodically. During the data transmission, they consume considerable amount of energy. However, sensor nodes are constrained with battery power and bandwidth. So, there is a limitation on the lifetime of the battery power and it is a challenging issue. Low Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy (LEACH) is the most famous hierarchical routing protocol, where the cluster head is selected randomly based on a threshold value and only cluster heads can send the information to the base station (BS). So, research on energy saving routings for static Wireless Sensor Networks that maximizes the network life time is well addressed in the literature. But, there is a lack of routing protocols for Mobile Wireless Sensor Networks in the existing literature. So, in this paper, attempt has been made to enhance the performance of LEACH protocol for Mobile Wireless Sensor Networks by introducing mobility at the base station. Simulation result shows that our proposed protocol maximizes the network lifetime 30%-40% over LEACH protocol.