Threshold Energy Based LEACH-K Effect on the Accessibility of Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper aims to deliver an exhaustive investigation on the threshold energy parameter's direct impact on the Cluster Head (CH) selection phase in Low-Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy Based on K-Means (LEACH-K) protocols. The most prominent threshold energy selection criterion out of the scarcely available research on the LEACH-K threshold energy parameter is used to simulate the LEACH-K protocol. Simulations are carried out on scaled-up Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) in terms of size and number of nodes. An analysis is performed on the life-cycle of the CH selection process, which leads to recording sensor nodes being still alive and inaccessible when the CH selection process ends. Therefore, the presented findings raise many concerns regarding the past research on LEACH-K simulations, marking a fatal research gap that has to be detailedly studied and inspected. © 2022 IEEE.