Comparative Study of Hierarchical Based Routing Protocols: Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor and Actor Networks (WSANs) comprise of sensors and actors to perform distributed sensing and acting tasks. Sensing of the environment using wireless sensor networks (WSN) has been one of the favorite areas of the research community. Conversion of this concept into real life implementable solutions would find interest only if a response mechanism is developed to complement the sensing. Introduction of the actor element in the WSNs makes it Wireless Sensor and Actor Networks (WSANs). The WSANs come with their set of issues having subtle differences from the WSN. The protocol design thus differs from the traditional WSNs. The issues like mobility of nodes, energy consumption, scalability, fault tolerance, response time have been highlighted in this paper and a survey and comparison are undertaken in respect to clustering based WSAN protocols.