ON SOLAR AWARE LEACH PROTOCOL FOR WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are an emerging technology that are finding applications in almost all walks of life and soon shall be all pervasive and ubiquitous. The acute resource crunch of power in these sensor nodes is a mission critical limitation. This dictates the viable operational network lifetime of WSN. In most cases, the battery power can neither be replenished nor be replaced. Thus the faster depleting of this resource shall lead to shortened network lifetime. Usage of existing energy in the most efficient manner is therefore at the core of many research interests. A large number of algorithms have been proposed and implemented for the energy efficiency to be achieved in various protocols designed for working at various layers. However, a comprehensive solution or a suite of such protocols for any application is yet to be holistically addressed. Also, little has been done in the area of energy harvesting within the nodes from the freely available natural energy e.g., solar, gravitational, heat, movement / acceleration etc. Further, no work actually evaluates the behaviour of any protocol to address the operational logistics issues and provide a template that a project manager in the industry will need to design the network and choose between the ranges of various parameters available given known constraints of a few parameters. In this dissertation work "On Solar Aware LEACH Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks ", significant enhancement of the efficiency of the algorithm and a template of bounded regions of metrics for optimized performance has been established. This comprehensively addresses the a number of flexible external issues for optimized deployment. In the proposed framework, the effect of variations in using solar energy, the extent of the sensor field, distance of base station, percentage of solar enabled nodes, climate variations, size of clusters (nodes per cluster) and scaling factors have been studied for effective substantive enhancement in the efficiency of the algorithm. The effectiveness of the approach and results are validated with simulations in OMNeT ++ on a Windows platform.