Novel routing protocol for heterogeneous wireless sensor networks

An improved LEACH for heterogeneous wireless sensor networks is proposed. Nodes are distributed in a sensing area that is divided into a number of same equilateral hexagons. Heterogeneous nodes act as the cluster heads and ordinary nodes act as those cluster sensors in all clusters. The structure of WSNs is a two-layer structure. The upper layer consists of all cluster heads and the lower layer consists of all ordinary sensors managed by their corresponding cluster heads. The cluster heads and the ordinary sensors establish their pairwise keys respectively through utilizing different methods. The arithmetic balances energy expense among all kinds of nodes, saves the node energy, and prolongs the life of wireless sensor networks. Additionally, Analysis demonstrates that the security of wireless sensor networks has been improved obviously even with some heterogeneous nodes.