LEATCH: Low Energy Adaptive Tier Clustering Hierarchy

In Wireless Sensor Networks, low latency, energy efficiency, and coverage problems are considered as three key issues in designing routing protocols. In this paper we present a new protocol called Low Energy Adaptive Tier Clustering Hierarchy (LEATCH), which offers a good compromise between delay and energy consumption and resolves some coverage problems. For our purpose, a two level hierarchical approach has been proposed to organize a sensor network into a set of clusters, every cluster divided into small clusters that are called Mini Clusters. As the way the clusters are organized, for each mini cluster we define a Mini Cluster- Head (MCH). Every MCH communicates with the cluster-head directly, it aggregates its mini-cluster information. In addition, we have made some changes in the procedure of cluster head and mini cluster head election. LEATCH promises better performances than the conventional LEACH protocol which is one of the most known hierarchical routing protocols using the probabilistic model to manage the energy consumption in WSNs. Simulation results show that LEATCH performs better than LEACH in term of energy, delay, coverage and scalability.