Comparison of Clustering Routing Protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks

Nowadays, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN's) has become progressively more attractive and has found its way into a wide variety of applications and systems because of its low-cost, self-organizing behavior and sensing ability in harsh environments. A WSN is a set of nodes arranged into a network. Routing is a vital technology in WSNs. It can be split into two groups namely flat routing and hierarchical routing. In flat routing all nodes have identical functionality and carry out the same task in the network. Whereas, nodes in a hierarchical routing have dissimilar duties and are usually arranged into clusters. This paper focuses on key clustering routing schemes for WSNs. We present a detailed comparison with simulations on NS-2 of LEACH, LEACH-C and PEGASIS and we deduce the performance of each with varying different parameters. It is evident from the simulation results that LEACH-C and PEGASIS outperform LEACH with respect to a number of key performance metrics.