Energy Consumption of Direct and Cluster-Based Data Collection in Wireless Sensor Networks: A Simulation Study of LEACH

Energy is the main constraint of battery-powered wireless sensor nodes, and data-collection protocols differ strongly in how they spend it. This paper simulates 100 nodes with 0.5 J of initial energy in a 100 m × 100 m field, with the base station 75 m beyond the field edge, using the first-order radio model, and compares direct transmission with a simplified LEACH cluster protocol for four cluster-head probabilities, averaged over 20 random layouts. The first node died after 94 rounds with direct transmission and after 189, 157, 132 and 114 rounds with LEACH at p = 0.02, 0.05, 0.10 and 0.20. The smallest cluster-head probability gave the longest time to first node death (+100 % versus direct) and 17 % more delivered sensor readings, while the time until the last node died was nearly the same for all protocols. The study is a simulation with a simplified protocol and idealised radio. This is a simulation study; all results are outputs of the deposited Python code with assumed parameters. Source code is attached.