Comparison of SPAN and LEACH protocol for topology control in wireless sensor networks

With the tremendous increase in wireless sensor technology, wireless sensor networks have been employed in various applications from industrial surveillance to medical monitoring. In wireless ad hoc and/or sensor networks, energy is the most critical constraint as it directly corresponds to operational lifetime of the nodes. To overcome this problem topology control protocols that extend the lifetime of dense ad hoc networks while preserving connectivity are used. In this paper we propose a modified SPAN protocol achieve efficient utilisation of node resources. Furthermore, our implementation of modified SPAN protocols yields a lifetime improvement of about 15 to 30% at each node.