Multi-Hop LEACH based Cross-layer Design for Large Scale Wireless Sensor Networks

The need for energy-efficient routing and data gathering protocols in large-scale environments becomes very challenging. Hierarchical routing in WSNs is a very important topic. It has been widely investigated relative to energy efficiency based routing protocols. LEACH (Low Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy algorithm) is the pioneering cluster routing protocol in WSNs. However, it is not suitable for large scale network and wireless channel conditions are ignored during packet forwarding. To address this issue, we proposed a novel multi-hop clustering cross layer protocol based on LEACH. It considers both the SNR of different links and the residual energy of sensor nodes. Simulation results in terms of the average energy consumption, the network lifetime and the Packet Delivery Ratio show clearly the outperformance of the proposed algorithm versus the conventional LEACH.