Energy Efficient Cooperative LEACH Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

We develop a low complexity cooperative diversity protocol for low energy adaptive clustering hierarchy (LEACH) based wireless sensor networks. A cross layer approach is used to obtain spatial diversity in the physical layer. In this paper, a simple modification in clustering algorithm of the LEACH protocol is proposed to exploit virtual multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) based user cooperation. In lieu of selecting a single cluster-head at network layer, we proposed M cluster-heads in each cluster to obtain a diversity order of M in long distance communication. Due to the broadcast nature of wireless transmission, cluster-heads are able to receive data from sensor nodes at the same time. This fact ensures the synchronization required to implement a virtual MIMO based space time block code (STBC) in cluster-head to sink node transmission. An analytical method to evaluate the energy consumption based on BER curve is presented. Analysis and simulation results show that proposed cooperative LEACH protocol can save a huge amount of energy over LEACH protocol with same data rate, bit error rate, delay and bandwidth requirements. Moreover, this proposal can achieve higher order diversity with improved spectral efficiency compared to other virtual MIMO based protocols.