Comparative Study of Energy-Efficient Hierarchical Wireless Sensor Network Protocols

A wireless sensor network (WSN) is a network with wireless transmission medium, where autonomous devices are spatially distributed using micro-sensors to monitor physical or environmental changes. From past few years, WSN has been an area which has fascinated many researchers with their new ideas to increase the lifetime of the sensor nodes. The battery power in these sensor nodes plays an important role in increasing its life-span. Hierarchical routing protocols are being proved to be best known protocols to minimise the energy consumption by many researchers. The optimisation of hierarchical clustering can improve still better by applying evolutionary technique. In this paper, we have surveyed the state-of-art of different hierarchical routing protocols. This paper also highlights some of the drawbacks and issues related to basic hierarchical protocols. In addition, authors have attempted to compare hierarchical protocols based on their network life of its sensor nodes that is the life-span of a network from the first to the last node from live to dead state.