Design and Improvement of Routing Protocol for Field Observation Instrument Networking Based on LEACH Protocol

Abstract

Field observation instruments in cold and arid areas are deployed with many difficulties caused by the harsh natural environment, which leads to the lag of information acquisition ability and severely restricts the geoscience research in these areas. Therefore, it is urgent to study the suitable routing technology of observation instrument networks according to the characteristics of cold and arid areas. In this paper, we have studied and designed an improved routing protocol for the field observation instruments network based on the LEACH protocol (FOI-LEACH). Firstly, the FOI-LEACH was proposed to mainly improve the LEACH protocol in three aspects: (1) the network nodes are heterogeneous and combined with the characteristics of field observation instrument networking. The residual energy and the rechargeable energy of nodes are added in the process of cluster head (CH) election to reduce the risk of premature death of CHs and shortened network life cycle caused by the selection of nodes with less energy as CH. (2) In the process of cluster forming, the distance from CH to the base station (BS) and the residual energy of CH is considered when setting the cluster radius, to reasonably plan the cluster size and alleviate the “hot spot” problem. The nonuniform distribution of clusters in the network is enhanced to balance the total network energy consumption. (3) The autonomous zone-based multihop routing mechanism is adopted to solve the low reliability of data transmission caused by the poor quality of intercluster communication links and premature death of nodes in long-distance transmission. Then, MATLAB was used to compare the network routing protocol model of the observation instrument from four aspects, network life, energy consumption rate, stability, and throughput. The results showed that the improved algorithm FOI-LEACH balances the network energy consumption and alleviates the “hot spot” problem, to extend the lifetime of network nodes.