Performance Investigation of Advanced Multi-Hop and Single-Hop Energy Efficient LEACH Protocol with Heterogeneous Nodes in Wireless Sensor Networks

Restricted battery life is a crucial constraint in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Many routing protocols have been proposed to reduce the energy consumption by extending the network lifetime. So, a new design of energy efficient routing using clustering is proposed where we use heterogeneous nodes for data transmission through the optimal path between cluster heads (CHs) and the base station (BS). This paper discusses the algorithm called Advanced-Multi-hop Low Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy (LEACH) protocol with heterogeneous nodes. Multi-hop LEACH protocol changes the mode of communication to prolong the network lifetime from single hop to multi-hop between the CH and BS by reducing energy consumption. The paper tries to evaluate the performance of the network in terms of lifetime and stability by introducing the concept of optimum number of clusters and also considers the optimum number of hops in the network with heterogeneous nodes. This paper also provides the algorithm for the avoidance of the overlapping of the clusters and collisions in the network. For the evaluation and comparison of the performance of advanced single-hop and multi-hop energy efficient LEACH protocols with heterogeneous nodes, MATLAB simulations are carried out. Results show that advanced-multi-hop LEACH protocol outperforms the advanced single-hop LEACH protocol regarding energy efficiency, stability and network lifetime.