Sleeping Cluster based Medium Access Control Layer Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks play a vital role in remote area applications, where human intervention is not possible. In a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) each and every node is strictly an energy as well as bandwidth constrained one. Problem Statement: In a standard WSN, most of the routing techniques, move data from multiple sources to a single fixed base station. Because of the greater number of computational tasks, the existing routing protocol did not address the energy efficient problem properly. In order to overcome the problem of energy consumption due to more number of computational tasks, a new method is developed. Approach: The proposed algorithm divides the sensing field into three active clusters and one sleeping cluster. The cluster head selection is based on the distance between the base station and the normal nodes. The Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) mechanism is used to make the cluster remain in the active state as well as the sleeping state. In an active cluster 50% of nodes will be made active and the remaining 50% be in sleep state. A sleeping cluster will be made active after a period of time and periodically changes its functionality. Results: Due to this periodic change of state, energy consumption is minimized. The performance of the Low Energy Adaptive and Clustering Hierarchy (LEACH) algorithm is also analyzed, using a network simulator NS2 based on the number of Cluster Heads (CH), energy consumption, Lifetime and the number of nodes alive. The simulation studies were carried out using a network simulation tool NS2, for the proposed method and this is compared with the performance of the existing protocol. The superiority of the proposed method is highlighted.