Voronoi Leach for Energy Efficient Communication in Wireless Sensor Networks

Energy efficient communication is significantly important for Wireless Sensor Networks as the energy is a scarce and constrained resource. In this paper, we have proposed a different version of LEACH (Low Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy) protocol called Voronoi LEACH, where the clusters in LEACH are replaced with Voronoi regions. The proposed protocol has better properties for energy efficient communication than LEACH protocol. The simulation results show that the Voronoi LEACH consumes less energy compared to the LEACH protocol. Keywords—Wireless sensor networks, energy efficiency, clusters, Voronoi diagrams. Introduction Wireless Sensor Networks have gained its popularity day by day because of its wide range of applications. In wireless sensor networks, the energy is one of the important component as the sensor node will be considered dead when the energy in the node is depleted. Hence, there is significant importance in designing the energy efficient communication methodologies for wireless sensor networks. The protocol LEACH proposed by Heinzelman et al. [4] was one of the popular energy efficient communication protocol used in wireless sensor networks. The LEACH protocol has two phases. In the phase I the protocol forms the clusters and in phase II, the sensor nodes send the information to their cluster heads which inturn send the aggregated information to the basestation. In phase I, it is very important to consider the formation of clusters in which a huge number of communication actions are taken place between the sensor nodes and the cluster heads. In the literature, many variations of the LEACH protocol were proposed. However, most of the algorithms focused on the criteria for selecting cluster heads based on many factors, such as energy levels in the node, to increase the network lifetime and the stability. In wireless communication systems, the energy consumption is directly proportional to the distance travelled by the frames [8][9]. In otherwords, the energy consumption , where d is the distance between the transmitter and receiver and is the path loss component [8][9]. If the distance between the transmitter and receiver is less, the energy consumption becomes low. In this paper, we have focused on designing a new type of clusters for the LEACH protocol such that the distance between a sensor node and the cluster head is minimum. However, due to the random distribution of sensor nodes, in the traditional approach, the cluster formations may have overlapping areas and this distribution of sensor nodes can be look alike as shown in Figure 1. In this figure, we can observe there are some sensor nodes in the overlapping cluster areas. These nodes sometimes have more distance to its cluster head than the other cluster heads. For example, consider the Figure 2, where two clusters have cluster heads H1 and H2 respectively. The sensor node a belongs to the cluster C1 always needs to transfer its data to the H1 only. Similarly, in cluster C2, the sensor node b needs to transfer the data the cluster head H2 only. The distances ̅̅ ̅̅ ̅ and ̅̅ ̅̅ ̅ are higher compared to the distances ̅̅ ̅̅ ̅ and ̅̅ ̅̅ ̅, respectively. Please note that the notation ̅̅ ̅ indicates the Euclidean distance between the two nodes x and y. Hence there is higher energy consumption in the system. We consider this as a problem in the paper and we design a solution for this problem using Voronoi diagrams [7]. In this paper, we use the Voronoi diagrams for forming clusters. With this kind of clusters, the protocol Proceedings of International Conference on Electronics Computer networks and Information Technology, Held on 21-22, Nov, 2015, in Dubai, ISBN:9788193137321 217 provides optimum energy consumption between sensor nodes and the cluster heads. The paper has been organized with the following sections. The next section provides the related work and the Section III describes the proposed protocol. The Section IV gives the simulation work whereas the Section V concludes the paper. Related Work In this section, we give the information related to the paper. The paper mainly focuses on saving the energy in communication system. There were many protocols proposed for energy efficient communication [10][11][12][13]. During this period, the protocol LEACH has been proposed for energy efficient communication for wireless sensor networks [4]. A wireless sensor network is a wireless network which collects the environment information through sensors and transmits to a destined place through the communication system [14]. In general, the sensor nodes contain energy constrained resources [15]. Hence, there is a need for the study of energy efficient communication systems for wireless sensor networks. The complete process of LEACH protocol is broadly divided into two phases [4]. The phase 1 is responsible for forming the clusters. The formula for making the sensor node as the cluster head is based on the threshold formula given below.