Abstract: Aiming at the problem of high energy consumption and unbalanced load in traditional LEACH protocol and its improved methods, we proposed an improved LEACH protocol based on chaotic genetic algorithm called CGA-LEACH to minimize the energy consumption for wireless sensor networks (WSNs). By constructing a new fitness function considering the energy consumption and load, the algorithm used conditional chaotic mapping to generate real coded chromosomes, and used the chaotic genetic selection, crossover and mutation operations to improve the convergence speed and find the optimal cluster heads, so as to form a cluster structure with uniform distribution, energy consumption and balanced load . Simulation results show that CGA-LEACH algorithm can effectively prolong network lifetime, balance network load and improve network energy efficiency.

Key words: wireless sensor networks (WSNs), chaotic genetic algorithm, LEACH protocol, minimum energy consumption