Multicluster ALLIANCES: A Hight Throughput and Energy Efficient Approach for Wireless Sensor Networks

ALLIANCES is a new cooperative random access protocol which was proposed for resolving collisions in wireless networks. It can achieve high throughput and enables efficient use of energy with minimal scheduling overhead. The initial ALLIANCES approach was designed based on a small-scale network with fixed infrastructure, i.e., there is a base station (BS) that takes care of synchronization issues, declares each collision, and coordinates retransmissions. In this paper we propose a multicluster extension of ALLIANCES that enables its application to a large-scale wireless sensor network (WSN). The network is divided into groups of nodes called clusters, and each cluster is headed by the cluster head (CH). Collision resolutions and transmissions of CHs in different clusters are separable. Nodes in a cluster communicate only with the CH, who in turn forwards the information to a sink node. Collisions within a cluster are resolved as in ALLIANCES by the CH, which acts like a BS. Our simulation results shows that, with a proper clustering algorithm, the proposed scheme can achieve better performance than ALOHA, TDMA and single cluster ALLIANCES.