A novel energy efficient vice Cluster Head routing protocol in Wireless Sensor Networks

In Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) with a clustered hierarchical structure, Cluster-Head (CH) nodes are considered the interface between the leaf normal sensors and the Base Station (BS). The energy dissipation of the sensors, whatever their type, can be optimized by a load balancing in the packet TX/RX process in order to prolong the network lifetime and minimize the advertisement phase time for cluster head selection in each round of the LEACH-C protocol. This paper proposes a routing protocol for LEACH_C WSN in which the system lifetime can be extended by assigning a vice cluster head (VCH) to each of the CHs. Unlike other different VCH based protocols, the assigned VCH doest not remain in the idle state and receive its responsibility by the death of the CH, rather the VCH shares the TX/RX load with its CH in order to balance the load distribution, shortly after the death of the CH a VCH is fully loaded until a new VCH receives the TX load. The simulation results confirm that the theoretically expected results. The functionality of the proposed protocol is tested under different simulation conditions such as the size of the WSN field and the results of simulation prove that the proposed protocol prolongs the network lifetime as expected.