An Application-Aware Clustering Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks to Provide QoS Management

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have long been established as a suitable technology for gathering and processing information from the environment. However, recent applications and new multimedia sensors have increased the demand for a more adequate management of their quality of service (QoS). The constraints and demands for this QoS management greatly depend on each individual network’s purpose or application. Low-Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy (LEACH) is arguably the most well-known routing protocol for WSNs, but it is not QoS-aware. In this paper, we propose LEACH-APP, a new clustering protocol based on LEACH that takes the network’s application into account and is aimed at providing a better overall QoS management. We thoroughly describe our proposal and provide a case study to explain its operation. Then, we evaluate its performance in terms of two significant QoS metrics—throughput and latency—and compare it to that of the original protocol. Our experiments show that LEACH-APP increases the throughput by roughly 250% and reduces the latency by almost 80%, overall providing a more flexible and powerful QoS management.