Performance Evaluation of Zone-Based Routing with Hierarchical Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks

Routing remains a most challenging task in sensor networks because of constrained resources like battery power, processing, and memory. Many energy efficiency techniques for the sensor networks have been proposed, among which hierarchical routing is considered the most energy-efficient and extended network lifetime technique. This technique has a lesser number of transmissions in the network. On the contrary, zone-based routing claims lesser control and routing overhead on the overall network lifetime. In this research, a simulation-based comparison of zone-based routing with static clustering hierarchical routing is conducted. The simulation results show that the zone-based routing outperforms hierarchical routing with static clustering in terms of energy efficiency, network lifetime, and throughput.

An Energy Aware Routing Algorithm for WSNs Based on Semi-Static Clustering

Energy efficiency is a key factor to improve WSNs’ performance, and hierarchical routing algorithms are fitter in large scale networks and have more reliability, so they are mostly used to improve the nodes’ energy efficiency now. In this paper, mainly existing hierarchical routing algorithms are introduced, and based on these researches, a new energy efficient hierarchical routing algorithm designed based on energy aware semi-static clustering method is proposed. In this algorithm named EASCA, the nodes’ residual energy and cost of communication would both be considered when clustering. And a special packet head is defined to update nodes’ energy information when transmitting message; to rotate cluster head automatically, a member management scheme is designed to complete this function; and a re-cluster mechanism is used to dynamic adjust the clusters to make sensor nodes organization more reasonable. At last, EASCA is compared with other typical hierarchical routing algorithms in a series of experiments, and the experiments’ result proves that EASCA has obviously improved WSNs’ energy efficiency.