Abstract:

Energy conservation is the primary consideration in wireless sensor networks. Extending the lifetime of the wireless sensor networks and balancing nodes’ load are the goal of designing the routing protocol in wireless sensor networks. Since the election of clusterhead nodes in the LEACH routing protocol does not take the energy into account, there are some deficiencies, such as the facts that the clusterhead nodes are distributed unevenly in space and that the energy is consumed too much during a longdistance data transmission. This paper proposes an improved version of the routing protocol LEACHZED, which employs the way of zonepartition, considers the nodes’ energy and the distance to Sink comprehensively, and transfers data in multihop among clusters. The simulation shows, LEACHZED extends the lifetime of the network effectively and reduces the energy consumption of the whole network, so it performs better than the LEACH routing protocol as a whole.

Key words: wireless sensor network;zonepartition;threshold;multihop