A Novel Self-Organizing Hybrid Network Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Recent development of wireless sensor networks (WSN) has led to the appearance of many application specific communication protocols which must be energy-efficient. Among those protocols developed for WSN, LEACH (low energy adaptive clustering hierarchy) protocol is one of the most promising protocols. In this paper, a novel self-organizing energy efficient hybrid protocol based on LEACH is presented, combining cluster based architecture and multiple-hop routing. Multi-hop routing is utilized for inter-cluster communication between cluster heads and the base station, instead of direct transmission in order to minimize transmission energy. Besides, this protocol adds some mechanisms to CSMA/CD (carrier sense multiple access with collision detection) so as to avoid collisions, instead of using other more complicated MAC protocols during the period of cluster formation. The performance of the novel protocol is evaluated and compared with LEACH. Simulation results demonstrate that our novel protocol can achieve better performance on energy efficiency and the lifetime of WSN