Homogeneous vs heterogeneous clustered sensor networks: a comparative study

TLDR

The study focuses on non‑mobile sensor nodes with a remotely located base station, contrasting homogeneous networks of identical nodes with heterogeneous networks comprising multiple node types organized into hierarchical clusters. The paper conducts a cost‑based comparison of homogeneous and heterogeneous clustered sensor networks and proposes the M‑LEACH multihop variant for homogeneous networks. The authors evaluate network dimensioning by accounting for hardware manufacturing cost and node battery energy, comparing single‑hop LEACH for homogeneous networks and a two‑type node heterogeneous network, and then extending to multihop with the proposed M‑LEACH variant while contrasting its cost against a heterogeneous two‑type in‑cluster multihop network. M‑LEACH demonstrates superior energy efficiency compared to LEACH in many scenarios.

Abstract

This paper presents a cost based comparative study of homogeneous and heterogeneous clustered sensor networks. We focus on the case where the base station is remotely located and the sensor nodes are not mobile. Since we are concerned with the overall network dimensioning problem, we take into account the manufacturing cost of the hardware as well as the battery energy of the nodes. A homogeneous sensor network consists of identical nodes, while a heterogeneous sensor network consists of two or more types of nodes (organized into hierarchical clusters). We first consider single hop clustered sensor networks (nodes use single hopping to reach the cluster heads). We use LEACH as the representative single hop homogeneous network, and a sensor network with two types of nodes as a representative single hop heterogeneous network. For multihop homogeneous networks (nodes use multihopping to reach the cluster head), we propose and analyze a multihop variant of LEACH that we call M-LEACH. We show that M-LEACH has better energy efficiency than LEACH in many cases. We then compare the cost of multihop clustered sensor networks with M-LEACH as the representative homogeneous network, and a sensor network with two types of nodes (that use in-cluster multi-hopping) as the representative heterogeneous network.