LEACH: An energy efficient routing protocol using Omnet++ for Wireless Sensor Network

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) comprises a large number of tiny sensor nodes. These nodes are intelligent of sensing and monitoring the environmental or physical condition like temperature, sound, pressure, motion, etc. and communicating with other nodes. Sensor nodes in WSN have limited power and energy constraint hence it becomes necessary to efficiently use these resources. Energy consumption is the major problem of WSN to overcome this problem there are many solutions introduced, it consists flat, hierarchical and location based routing. The basic hierarchical routing protocol for WSN is Low Energy Adaptive clustering Hierarchy (LEACH). LEACH works in two different phases viz. set-up and steady-state phase. LEACH periodically do the rotations among cluster-head nodes in such a way that every node gets a chance to become cluster head and distributes energy consumption between the nodes in the network which reduces the power utilization, increasing the lifetime of the network. In this paper detail working of LEACH is discussed using Omnet++ simulator.