Energy-efficient communication protocols for wireless microsensor networks

TLDR

Wireless distributed microsensor systems enable reliable monitoring of diverse environments for civil and military applications. This study examines communication protocols’ impact on energy dissipation and proposes LEACH, a clustering-based protocol that rotates cluster-heads to evenly distribute energy load. LEACH employs localized coordination, randomized cluster-head rotation, and data fusion to reduce transmitted data, thereby achieving scalability and robustness in dynamic networks. Simulations demonstrate that LEACH reduces energy dissipation by up to eightfold and doubles network lifetime by evenly distributing energy consumption among sensors.

Abstract

Wireless distributed microsensor systems will enable the reliable monitoring of a variety of environments for both civil and military applications. In this paper, we look at communication protocols, which can have signicant impact on the overall energy dissipation of these networks. Based on our ndings that the conventional protocols of direct transmission, minimum-transmission-energy, multihop routing, and static clustering may not be optimal for sensor networks, we propose LEACH (Low-Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy), a clustering-based protocol that utilizes randomized rotation of local cluster base stations (cluster-heads) to evenly distribute the energy load among the sensors in the network. LEACH uses localized coordination to enable scalability and robustness for dynamic networks, and incorporates data fusion into the routing protocol to reduce the amount of information that must be transmitted to the base station. Simulations show that LEACH can achieve as much as a factor of 8 reduction in energy dissipation compared with conventional routing protocols. In addition, LEACH is able to distribute energy dissipation evenly throughout the sensors, doubling the useful system lifetime for the networks we simulated.