Effect of Decentralized Clustering Algorithm and Hamming Coding on WSN Lifetime and Throughput

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) has become an interesting field of research because of its wide range of applications such as environmental monitoring, electromagnetic pollution monitoring, medical applications and industrial applications (Teo et al., 2007; Margi et al., 2009; Castelluccia et al., 2005; AbouElSeoud et al., 2010; Tavares et al., 2008). WSN consists of multi-functioning sensor nodes with limited power capacity, so prolonging the lifetime is essential and is one of the main concerns (Castelluccia et al., 2005; Schmidt et al., 2009; Karlsson et al., 2005). For this reason different routing protocols are obtained to increase network lifetime. The clustering routing protocol is one of the most commonly routing protocols because it is energy efficient (Heinzelman et al., 2000, 2002). In any clustering protocol, the network is divided into clusters where some nodes are responsible for others. These nodes are called cluster heads (CHs) or network masters (NMs). There are different algorithms and different methods of choosing the CHs. For example, LEACH (Heinzelman et al., 2000) used the randomized rotation to choose CH nodes. This randomized rotation allows some nodes to act as CHs and the others cannot. Therefore LEACH was improved to be LEACH-C (Heinzelman et al., 2002) that uses central algorithm to choose the CHs and allows only the nodes in the center of each cluster to act as CHs. Also two different algorithms of choosing the NMs are considered in (Botros et al., 2009). The network is considered as one cluster; therefore the CH node that is responsible for collecting data from other nodes is called NM. In the first algorithm, the sensor could become NM more than once for a fixed number of cycles. It was proven that this algorithm provided a lifetime longer than the lifetime obtained by LEACH and LEACH-C algorithms (Heinzelman et al., 2000, 2002). However, this algorithm has some residual energy after the network failure and this energy cannot be used anymore. Therefore, the second algorithm is obtained to improve the first one by allowing each sensor to become NM once with a different number of cycles and acts as an active node or ordinary node (that senses the