Int. J. Wireless and Mobile Computing, Vol. 11, No. 2, 2016 117 Copyright © 2016 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd. Fuzzy-based fault-tolerant low-energy adaptive clustering hierarchy routing protocol for wireless sensor network Maya Shelke* Department of Computer Science and Information Technology, Symbiosis Institute of Technology, Pune, Maharashtra, India Email: mayas@sitpune.edu.in *Corresponding author Getenet Tefera Department of Computer Science, Symbiosis Institute of Technology, Pune, Maharashtra, India Email: getmary21@gmail.com Akshay Malhotra Department of Electronics and Telecommunications, Symbiosis Institute of Technology, Pune, Maharashtra, India Email: dydirector@sitpune.edu.in Parikshit Mahalle Department of Computer Science, Smt. Kashibai Navale COE, Pune, Maharashtra, India Email:aalborg.pnm@gmail.com Abstract: Wireless sensor networks employ a number of sensor nodes (motes) that have limitations of battery-power, sensing, computation, and wireless communication capabilities. The design of an efficient routing protocol to be used by these motes has a very significant impact on the overall lifetime of the network. Clustering motes and structuring them hierarchically provides better data aggregation and scalability while also considering the energy constraints. We present an enhanced version of Low Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy (LEACH) routing protocol called Fuzzy Based Fault Tolerant-LEACH (FTLEACH), which considers remaining battery- power, centrality of cluster head and node density during routing. The routing process involves clustering of motes, assigning of cluster head, replica cluster head and identifying faulty motes. Our results show that the enhanced approach provides better performance than the existing LEACH protocol in terms of first node fails, and half node alive and it exhibits better stability, and lower delay and maximises network lifetime. Keywords: wireless sensor networks; fuzzy logic; replica cluster head; faulty node; FTLEACH; fuzzy-based fault-tolerant LEACH; low-energy adaptive clustering hierarchy. Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Shelke, M., Tefera, G., Malhotra, A. and Mahalle, P. (2016) ‘Fuzzy-based fault-tolerant low-energy adaptive clustering hierarchy routing protocol for wireless sensor network’, Int. J. Wireless and Mobile Computing, Vol. 11, No. 2, pp.117–123. Biographical notes: Maya Shelke is currently an Assistant Professor in Symbiosis Institute of Technology, Symbiosis International University, Pune. She completed ME (CSE) in 2011 from Anna University, Chennai. Her research interests are wireless sensor networks, network security and data analysis.