A Taxonomy of Cluster-Based Routing Protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks

Recent advances in wireless sensor technologies have resulted in development of low cost and low power sensor nodes. Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have increasingly been used for remotely monitoring tasks. Limited capabilities of sensor nodes in terms of communication, computation and storage, present challenges for protocols designed for WSNs. Due to the severe energy constraint of sensor nodes, among the major concerns is the problem of designing efficient energy-aware routing protocols. A large number of routing protocols has been proposed in the literature. They basically differ depending on the application and network architecture used in their design. Cluster-based routing protocols for large-scale WSNs have some advantages as compared to a flat network topology. Clustering results in a reduced number of messages that propagate through the network in order to accomplish a sensing task. It also offers an improved power control. In this paper, we present clustering energy-aware routing protocols for WSNs, highlight their features and present a comparison of the protocols' features.