A NOVEL FAULT-TOLERANT LEACH CLUSTERING PROTOCOL FOR WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS

Energy restrictions are a major challenge for wireless sensor networks, since after the deployment of network nodes in the environment, they can hardly be accessed or even recharged. Since the nodes are placed in harsh and unfriendly areas, they rapidly become prone to defects. Therefore, the management of these networks towards increasing their fault-tolerance capacity in the face of limited resources is extremely important. In this paper, a novel protocol is presented here, where in each node as a cluster member must send its last residing energy level to its upstream head cluster. Also, to prevent rework and energy loss, the node will see to it that only when the current sensed data is different than that of the previous interval, it sends the sensed data to the cluster head (CH). So, on the one hand the proposed protocol distinguishes between live and faulty nodes and therefore increases the network's fault-tolerance capacity, and on the other hand it prevents energy loss by eliminating rework. To implement Leach algorithm plus the proposed FT-Leach protocol, we used MATLAB software to simulate node energy consumption in each interval along with the residing energy of the nodes. The results and comparisons showed that our proposed protocol is visibly better than Leach in terms of fault-tolerance capacity and also energy consumption which ultimately extends network's lifetime.