Abstract: In recent years, the wireless sensor networks (WSN) attract increasing attention due to its bright application prospect in both military and civil fields. Energy conservation becomes a crucial problem in WSN routing protocol. Cluster-based routing protocols such as LEACH conserve energy by forming clusters which only cluster heads need to consumo extra energy to perform data aggregation and transmit it to base station. Unfortunately, cluster formation not only dissipates lots of energy but also increases overhead. We proposed a distributed, weighted clustering algorithm which improves the cluster formation process of LEACH by taking residual energy, mutual position, workload balance and MAC functioning in to consideration. The algorithm is flexible and coefficients can be adjusted according to different networks. The simulation experiments demonstrate the algorithm proposed in this paper is better in performance than LEACH.

Key words: Wireless sensor networks, Energy efficient, Cluster formation