LEAPET: A New Energy Efficient Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

The LEAPET model is a cross-layer design for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) that combines the functionalities of already existing Low-Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy (LEACH), Power-Efficient Gathering in Sensor Information Systems (PEGASIS), and Adaptive Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) protocols to improve energy efficiency and data transmission. Since rapid energy depletion of the sensor nodes is a major concern of WSNs, LEAPET overcomes this limitation by leveraging hierarchical clustering, chain-based data aggregation, and adaptive time-division scheduling to optimise both energy usage and communication efficiency. In this study, the LEACH forms clusters and chooses Cluster Heads (CHs). All other members within the cluster will send data to the CH instead of an individual data transmission to the base station (BS). The PEGASIS introduces chain-based data routing, which reduces energy consumption by limiting long-distance transmissions. In the PEGASIS chain formation, each node aggregates data sent to it and then transmits it to the neighbouring node in the chain until the aggregated data reaches the chain leader, which forwards it to the BS. To reduce the data collision from the chain leaders of the PEGASIS chain, an adaptive TDMA technique was used to allocate time slots for data transmission. The performance of the LEAPET protocol was compared to the existing LEACH and PEGASIS protocols using the number of alive nodes after rounds of data transmission, energy consumption and network lifetime metrics. The results of the simulations show that LEAPET outperforms existing LEACH and PEGASIS in terms of prolonged network lifetime, energy consumption and throughput. All simulations were carried out using the MATLAB programming language.