Experimental-based Analysis of the Effect of Channel Errors in the Cluster Formation Phase in Wireless Sensor Networks

In this paper we present an experimental analysis of the performance of the cluster formation phase of a wireless sensor network. Unlike previous works, this analysis considers the effect of channel errors overran adaptive transmission probability scheme that is used in the cluster formation phase. Particularly, we study the impact of channel errors over the energy consumption and the average cluster formation time. The cluster scheme under study is based on the well-known LEACH protocol, which organizes the nodes of a wireless sensor network into groups in order to distribute the energy consumption of each node. However, in order to reduce processing time and energy consumption, we propose a variant of LEACH protocol where nodes are chosen to be cluster heads or cluster members based only on the order of arrival of nodes (called LEACH MOD), instead of whether or not a node has been a cluster head in the past.