DEEC and EDEEC Routing Protocols for Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks: A Brief Comparative Study

Nowadays, humanity lives in the digital era; the machine age. Information is shared between humans and machines ubiquitously. Several researchers focus on data routing in wireless sensor networks (WSN). Among the major challenges to make the network more and more efficient are the conservation of energy, which can extend the life of the network, and the speed of routing of information, which allows the network to respond quickly. The network security is another important aspect in the WSNs. These factors are the fundamental design issues in sensor networks. A WSN protocol can be either homogeneous or heterogeneous. In the homogeneous WSN, the sensor nodes are supplied with an equal amount of initial energy while heterogeneous networks have uneven initial energy distribution. One may consider multi-level initial energy distribution. In a two-level distribution, advanced nodes have higher energy in comparison to normal nodes. Distributed Energy Efficient Clustering (DEEC) and Enhanced Distributed Energy Efficient Clustering (EDEEC) heterogeneous wireless network protocols are presented in this paper.