Power consumption is an important design criterion in

the design of wireless sensor networks. Hybrid radio

frequency/free space optical wireless sensor networks (RF/FSO

WSN) have been proposed to reduce the energy consumption of

traditional RF-based sensor networks. This paper compares the

performance of such a hybrid sensor network against the wellknown

RF-based low energy adapting clustering hierarchy

(LEACH) WSN proposed in the literature. Network performance

is studied in terms of network lifetime and average network area

coverage. Simulations show that despite not employing data

aggregation, the RF/FSO WSN has a longer lifetime and larger

average network coverage when compared to the LEACH WSN