Homogeneous vs heterogeneous clustered sensor networks: a comparative study

This paper presents a cost based comparative study of homogeneous and heterogeneous clustered sensor networks. We focus on the case where the base station is remotely located and the sensor nodes are not mobile. Since we are concerned with the overall network dimensioning problem, we take into account the manufacturing cost of the hardware as well as the battery energy of the nodes. A homogeneous sensor network consists of identical nodes, while a heterogeneous sensor network consists of two or more types of nodes (organized into hierarchical clusters). We first consider single hop clustered sensor networks (nodes use single hopping to reach the cluster heads). We use LEACH as the representative single hop homogeneous network, and a sensor network with two types of nodes as a representative single hop heterogeneous network. For multihop homogeneous networks (nodes use multihopping to reach the cluster head), we propose and analyze a multihop variant of LEACH that we call M-LEACH. We show that M-LEACH has better energy efficiency than LEACH in many cases. We then compare the cost of multihop clustered sensor networks with M-LEACH as the representative homogeneous network, and a sensor network with two types of nodes (that use in-cluster multi-hopping) as the representative heterogeneous network.