A Study on Reducing the Power Consumption of Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract — A wireless sensor network with a large number of sensor nodes can be used as an effective tool for gathering data in various situations. One of the major issues in wireless sensor networks is developing an energy-efficient routing protocol which has a significant impact on the overall lifetime of the sensor network. This paper focuses on reducing the power consumption of wireless sensor networks. Therefore, a communication protocol named LEACH (Low-Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy) is modified. We propose a clustering routing protocol that partitions the network into clusters; the cluster contains, CH, sub-CH (the node that will become a CH of the cluster in case of CH dies), cluster nodes; thus extends network lifetime. We have conducted simulation-based evaluations to compare the performance of the proposed protocol against Low-Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy (LEACH). Our experiment results show that this protocol outperforms LEACH in terms of network lifetime and power consumption minimization.