Efficient Energy Utilization in Fog Computing based Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) consist of thousands of sensing nodes that are deployed at remote locations for continuous probing of the surrounding environment in order to collect useful data. In general, each node is equipped with a fixed battery and limited working duration. The fixed battery condition is dominating these days and therefore energy efficiency is an important factor to be considered when the protocols are being designed. In this paper, we implement an enhanced version of Low-Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy (LEACH) protocol named as LEACH with Dijkstra's Algorithm (LEACH-DA) under a cloud environment, which optimizes the power consumption or energy utilization based on shortest path selection. Also, the proposed framework incorporates load balancing by picking an appropriate cluster head (CH) node among its alternates by calculating their traffic situation with the sink/base station or cloud. In addition, we employ a fog computing model for our scenario (i.e. LEACH-DA-Fog) in order to increase lifespan of network as compared to the original implementation of the underlying protocol. Some test cases are presented to show that the proposed updates on the classical LEACH protocol improve the network efficiency as well as the durability of the whole network.