MH-LEACH: A Distributed Algorithm for Multi-Hop Communication in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) consist in a set of nodes that collect information from the environment and send it to a Base Station that processes the final data. Some challenges in order to minimize the power consumption and maximize the network lifetime in this kind of networks can be found. This paper presents MH-LEACH, an algorithm that permits to establish a multi-hop communication between sensor nodes, which aims to save energy. Using MH-LEACH, a sensor will have options to transmit their data to closer nodes, always sending the collected data to the base station. This proposal was incorporated into the LEACH protocol being evaluated through simulations. The results show improvements in the approach when compared to the original version of LEACH. Keywords-Sensor networks; Multi-Hop communication; energy consumption;