PEGASIS: Power-efficient gathering in sensor information systems

Sensor webs consisting of nodes with limited battery power and wireless communications are deployed to collect useful information from the field. Gathering sensed information in an energy efficient manner is critical to operate the sensor network for a long period of time. In W. Heinzelman et al. (Proc. Hawaii Conf. on System Sci., 2000), a data collection problem is defined where, in a round of communication, each sensor node has a packet to be sent to the distant base station. If each node transmits its sensed data directly to the base station then it will deplete its power quickly. The LEACH protocol presented by W. Heinzelman et al. is an elegant solution where clusters are formed to fuse data before transmitting to the base station. By randomizing the cluster heads chosen to transmit to the base station, LEACH achieves a factor of 8 improvement compared to direct transmissions, as measured in terms of when nodes die. In this paper, we propose PEGASIS (power-efficient gathering in sensor information systems), a near optimal chain-based protocol that is an improvement over LEACH. In PEGASIS, each node communicates only with a close neighbor and takes turns transmitting to the base station, thus reducing the amount of energy spent per round. Simulation results show that PEGASIS performs better than LEACH by about 100 to 300% when 1%, 20%, 50%, and 100% of nodes die for different network sizes and topologies.