Centralized Multi-Hop Routing Based on Multi-Start Minimum Spanning Forest Algorithm in the Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are widely applied in environmental monitoring, target tracking, military, and industrial fields. However, the battery energy of sensor nodes in WSNs is limited, which limits its development. Previous studies have shown that clustering protocols and multi-hop communication are beneficial to reduce nodes energy consumption. The multi-hop protocol based on low energy adaptive clustering hierarchy (LEACH) has been proven to significantly reduce energy dissipation. However, LEACH-based multi-hop protocols generally have the problem of unbalanced energy dissipation and data conflicts. In this paper, we propose a centralized multi-hop routing based on multi-start minimum spanning forest (LEACH-CMF) to optimize LEACH. In order to realize multi-hop communication, we introduced a multi-start minimum spanning tree algorithm to select relay nodes with the minimum relay cost and generate appropriate multi-hop paths. To avoid data collision in multi-hop communication and make nodes including the cluster heads sleep as much as possible in the non-working state, we design a bottom-up continuous time slot allocation method to improve the time division multiple access (TDMA) cycle. We performed simulation in NS2. The simulation results show that the network lifetime is approximately doubled compared to LEACH and centralized low energy adaptive clustering hierarchy (LEACH-C). The simulation results show that the proposed protocol can effectively balance the energy dissipation of nodes and prolong network lifetime.