A Comparative Analysis of Energy Efficient Hierarchical Routing Protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks

Last few years increasing use of WSNs in applications such as security surveillance, monitoring structural health of buildings, habitant monitoring, health care and disaster management have been observed. Biggest constraint with WSN's is limited energy of the participating sensor nodes and most of the time it is near to impossible to change or replenish battery of a node as sensor nodes that maybe potentially deployed in harsh environmental conditions is unmanageable. Sustaining a long life is major challenge for WSNs and hierarchical routing protocols provide amicable solution in terms of energy efficient routing of data. In these type of protocols sensor nodes may be gathered into possibly non overlapping clusters. Clusters have cluster heads that can be used to for data agglomeration and route data to desired sink. We in this paper provide taxonomy of hierarchical routing protocols and look to envision a hybrid hierarchical routing protocol that may embeds characteristics of intelligent routing protocols.