A novel application specific network protocol for wireless sensor networks

The recent interest in wireless sensor networks (WSN) has led to the emergence of many application specific communication protocols which must be energy-efficient. Among those protocols developed for WSN, LEACH (low energy adaptive clustering hierarchy) protocol is one of the most popular protocols. In this paper, a novel application specific energy efficient protocol based on LEACH is presented, combining a cluster based architecture and multiple-hop routing. Multi-hop routing is utilized for inter-cluster communication between cluster heads and the base station, instead of direct transmission in order to minimize transmission energy. Besides, this protocol adds some mechanisms to CSMA/CD (carrier sense multiple access with collision detection) so as to avoid collisions, instead of using other more complicated MAC protocols. Simulation results, compared with LEACH, demonstrate that our novel protocol can reduce energy consumption and hence prolong the lifetime of WSN.