Probabilistic Modeling of Leach Protocol and Computing Sensor Energy Consumption Rate in Sensor Networks

One important performance index of routing mechanisms in sensor networks is sensor lifespan. In our settings, sensors are energy-constrained by batteries and located far away from the access point. A sensor dies once its battery dies. Since the radio transmission consumes a lot of energy, researchers proposed several routing mechanisms to save energy to prolong the sensor lifespan. So far, the comparison of different routing mechanisms are based on simulation and little analytical results were available. In this project, we use graph and stochastic modeling techniques to compare the sensor lifespan among different routing mechanisms including direct transmission, minimum energy transmission, static clustering, and dynamic clustering.