An improved inter-cluster multi-hop LEACH protocol oriented reliable transmission in WSNs

In view of the problems of the degradation of data transmission reliability and the loss of important data caused by electromagnetic interference, environmental noise and node failure in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), an improved LEACH protocol based on the differentiated service model is presented. In this protocol, the gathered data are divided into different transmission levels according to the importance of the data; when the data are forwarded by the source cluster head node, the communication links between the cluster head node and the sink node are increased with the increase of the level of data; for the data with high level, the several redundant links with multi-hops are used to ensure packets to reach the sink node, and for the data with low level, the transmission strategy with low energy consumption is adopted to transmit data packets so as to realize the balance between the energy consumption and transmission reliability in WSNs. The simulation results show that this scheme can obviously improve the transmission reliability of the important data and additional network overhead is not obvious owing to the low occurrence probability of a monitoring event. Compared to the other three protocols, this protocol has better performance, which is very suitable for the application with the requirement for high reliability in data transmission in WSNs.