Energy based Efficiency Evaluation of Cluster-Based Routing Protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs)

The design of routing protocols for wireless sensor network (WSN) is influenced by many challenging factors such as fault tolerance, energy efficiency, scalability, latency, power consumption and network topology etc. Among all of them the energy is often considered as primary resource constraint in a wireless sensor network. The main factors affecting energy consumption are: perceptual data, data processing and radio communications, the radio communication is the main part of energy consumption. Hence, energy conservation is one of the foremost priorities in the design of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) protocols having significant impact on the overall energy consumption. Recently, clustering routing techniques show their great attitude towards efficient data gathering by minimizing overall energy consumption as well as load balancing with improved network reliability and scalability. However, in harsh nature lossy wireless deployment all above mentioned advantages can not be achieved simultaneously by all routing schemes. Therefore, this paper examines the performance as well as energy consumption issues of the existing routing schemes by providing periodic data from a sensing field to a remote receiver in lossy wireless environment. So that, the network lifetime can be increased to reasonable times. We formulate the energy consumption and study their estimated lifetime based on varying parameters related to the sensing field, e.g., size, and distance etc. The simulation is conducted though the network simulation tool MATLAB7.0, over various routing schemes show that long distance communication, unnecessary multihop data transmission, data path looping, data redundancy, memory overflow, synchronization issues and inappropriate selection of MAC layer mechanism are the main challenging issues which leads to excessive data packet loss and consumes a significant amount of node energy in cluster based WSNs.