Abstract

Wireless Sensor network has emerged as a promising technique that revolutionizes the way of sensing information. Dense deployed sensor nodes at a specific region are likely to transfer redundant data to the base station. This increase the communicational overhead and affects network lifetime. The objective of this paper is to achieve prolonged network lifetime with overall energy efficiency in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) through controlled utilization of limited energy. In wireless sensor networks most of the energy spent is consumed in routing the sensed data from cluster head to base station. Back up heads are introduced to avoid frequent re-clustering in each cluster. A modification to existing clustering technique in the LEACH is done by implementing Distributed Clustering Algorithm (DCA) in LEACH protocol. The use of hierarchical or cluster-based routing helps in conserving more energy and setting of the other group members in the same cluster to a sleep mode reduces energy consumption of the WSN. This results in overall energy efficiency with prolonged network lifetime. Based on the study, the future research areas and issues to be focused are Security, Energy conservation, query processing, communication & uncertainty in sensor reading.