Routing Protocols for Enhanced Energy Efficiency in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

The rapid progress made on wireless sensor networks (WSNs) has created a necessity for effective and energy efficient routing protocols that can be beneficial with respect to energy consumption. Efficiency of energy usage especially in the WSNs has always proven to be a tough nut to crack because the sensor nodes have constrained batteries and extended periods of network operation is preferable. This work deals with the assessment and comparison of five well-known routing protocols i.e. Low Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy (LEACH), Power Efficient Gathering in Sensor Information System (PEGASIS), Threshold sensitive Energy Efficient Sensor Network (TEEN), Geographic and Energy Aware Routing (GEAR) and a new Hybrid Protocol on several performance measures aimed at investigating the performance of the protocols in improving energy efficiency.

In this study, a network area measuring 100m x 100m with 100 static sensor nodes randomly deployed is designed and simulated. The simulation tool employed in this analysis is MATLAB which offers a platform to gain and test each protocol under the same network circumstances without any modifications. The main performance parameters that were focused on include the overall duration of the network, the mean energy consumption for each round, the Packet Delivery Ratio PDR and the delays.

The results of this study suggest that the Hybrid Protocol will perform best in large scale WSN applications where it is necessary to have high data delivery efficiency with lower delays, and longer network life.