Review of Hierarchical Routing Protocols in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks comprises of small size sensor nodes with sensing , computation and wireless communications capability. These sensor nodes have very limited power and their process and storage capacity as well as transmission range and energy resources are also limited. Efficient power management is utmost requirement for these sensor nodes to keep it operational by increasing its lifetime. Since sensor networks are application dependent so a single routing technique cannot cater to all necessities. There are various routing protocols like location-aided, multi-path, data centric, mobility-based, QoS based, heterogeneity-based, hierarchical routing, hybrid routing, etc., in which optimal routing can be achieved in the context of energy. As the data travels from one cluster level to another covering greater amount of distance in hierarchy based routing it improves the scalability and increases the lifetime of the wireless sensor network by distributing the power dissipation load evenly among all the sensor nodes within the network. In this paper focus is on hierachical energy aware available routings in wireless sensor networks.