A WSN (Wireless Sensor Network) consists of over hundreds of sensor nodes which have limited
energy, process capability and memory. The applications of WSN in some extreme environment make
sensor nodes difficult to replace once they use up the battery resource. Since the wireless transmission
is the most energy consuming operation, how to design an energy efficient routing protocol becomes
the main goal for the wireless sensor network. LEACH is considered as the most popular routing
protocol which has better performance in saving the energy consumption. However, the selecting
formula neglecting the change of nodes’ energy will make the nodes acting as cluster heads too many
times which leads to the death of the cluster head early by consuming excessive amount of energy.
Also, the frequent reclustering wastes certain amount of energy. This paper presents a new version of
LEACH protocol referred to as VLEACH which aims to reduce energy consumption within the
wireless network.
