LEACH-SC: A spatial correlation-based protocol for energy-efficient data collection in wireless sensor networks

In this paper, we propose to use correlations to optimize network operations in terms of energy-efficiency and data quality for data collection applications. We present a novel approach that uses spatial correlations between geographic neighboring nodes to form maximal cliques. Then, we apply it to protocol LEACH by adding a pre-selection phase to elect representative nodes in each clique to be activated for LEACH operations. Matlab™ simulations show significant improvement of energy-efficiency of our proposed protocol LEACH-SC, while it preserves data quality represented by the number of data packets delivered to the base station and the cluster-heads, and the network coverage ratio in comparison with protocol LEACH.