Performance Analysis of Variable Energy Levels of Clustering Protocols for Wireless Sensor Network

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are emerging in various fields like wildlife monitoring, mining industries and security surveillance. The efficiency of sensor networks strongly depends on the routing protocol used. Routing protocols providing an optimal data transmission route from sensor nodes to sink to save energy of nodes in the network. Different routing mechanisms have been proposed to address energy optimization problem in sensor nodes. Clustering mechanism is one of the popular WSNs routing mechanisms. To check the efficiency of different clustering scheme against different-level of energy for sensor nodes, this paper select four cluster based routing protocols; Low Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy (LEACH)-single energy level nodes, Stable Election Protocol (SEP)two energy level nodes, An Enhanced Stable Election Protocol(SEP-E)-three energy level nodes and Distributed Energy Efficient Clustering (DEEC)multi energy level nodes. Here, perform analytical simulations in MATLAB by choosing number of alive nodes, number of dead nodes, overall life time of the network, number of packets and energy consumption , as performance metrics. Simulation results reveal that DEEC protocol outperforms by increasing the stability period of the typical network approximately by 48.91% ,34.86% , 22.8% respectively longer than LEACH,SEP and SEP-E, and shows that in DEEC number of packets transmission increases as compare with other protocols. Also DEEC is more energy efficient since nodes in this protocol deplete their energy in very slow rate. Also, this paper presents the comparison of the performance of different cluster-based routing protocols with the various locations of Base Station(BS) from the sensing fields. The stability period of those protocols via computer simulation are analyzed by varying the position of the BS. The simulation results show the high performance for DEEC when the BS is located at the center to the network dimension but SEP-E show higher performance than DEEC when placing the BS far from the center of the network dimension.