Leach for Wireless Sensor Networks

Most routing protocols designed for wireless sensor networks used the unit disk graph model (UGD) to represent the physical layer. This model does not take into account fluctuations of the radio signal. Therefore, these protocols must be improved to be adapted to a non-ideal environment. In this paper, we used the lognormal shadowing (LNS) model to represent a non-ideal environment. In this model, the probability of successful reception is calculated according to the link quality. We evaluated LEACH’s performance with LNS model to illustrate the effects of radio signal. Unfortunately, our findings showed that the fluctuations of signal radio have a significant impact on protocol performance. Thereby, we proposed a Fault-Tolerant LEACH-based Routing scheme (FTLR scheme) to improve the performance of LEACH in a non-ideal environment. Simulation results proved that our contribution provides good performance over the ideal model in terms packet loss rate and energy consumption.