Abstract
Reducing energy consumption is a key challenge in the design of any routing protocol dedicated to wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In this study, the authors introduce a new low energy consumption protocol based on a cooperative relaying technique. The proposed protocol is called distributed cooperative relaying low energy adaptive clustering hierarchy (DCR-LEACH) protocol, and is a way of improving the LEACH protocol. The authors have exploited cooperative relaying transmission techniques, in order to enhance LEACH for large-scale WSNs, whereby, a cluster head cooperates with the most energetic nodes in order to transmit collected data to the sink. To evaluate the energy efficiency of the proposed DCR-LEACH, they derive the expressions of energy consumption by applying a cooperative relaying technique and simulate the DCR-LEACH using NS-2 for three different scenarios. To confirm the efficiency of the DCR-LEACH protocol, they compare the proposed scheme with both LEACH and multi-hop routing LEACH (MR-LEACH) protocols. The experimental results prove that for large-scale WSNs, the performance of DCR-LEACH protocol is better than MR-LEACH and conventional LEACH in terms of network lifetime, energy consumption, and number of data transmission.