A version of LEACH adapted to the lognormal shadowing model

Abstract

The most protocols designed for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been developed for an ideal environment represented by unit disc graph model (UDG) in which the data is considered as successfully received if the communicating nodes are within the transmission range of each other. However, these protocols do not take into account the fluctuations of radio signal that can happen in realistic environment. This paper aims to adapt LEACH protocol for realistic environment since LEACH is considered as the best cluster-based routing protocol in terms of energy consumption for WSNs. We have carried out an evaluation of LEACH based on two models; lognormal shadowing model (LNS) in which the probability of reception without error is calculated according to the Euclidian distance separating the communicating nodes and probabilistic model in which the probability of reception is generated randomly. In both models, if the probability of successful reception is lower than a predefined threshold, a multi-hop communication is incorporated for forwarding data between cluster-heads (CHs) towards the base station instead of direct communication as in original version of LEACH. The main aims of this contribution are minimizing energy consumption and guaranteeing reliable data delivery to the base station. The simulation results show that our proposed algorithm outperforms the original LEACH for both models in terms of energy consumption and ratio of successful received packets.