Energy aware and cluster-based routing protocols for large-scale ambient sensor networks

The Ambient Intelligence paradigm is built upon Ubiquitous Computing (UC), in which the computing devices are embedded in the environment with the purpose of enhancing the human experience at home, workplace/office, learning, health care etc. The UC applications aim at providing services to the users anywhere, anytime in an unobtrusive, seemingly invisible way. Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have great potential for UC applications and are envisioned to revolutionize them. However, before WSNs become a commodity, several issues remain to be resolved. Among the major concerns of designing WSN for UC applications is the design of efficient energy-aware routing protocols. A large number of routing protocols has been proposed in the literature. They basically differ depending on the application and network architecture used in their design. In this paper, we present clustering energy-aware routing protocols for WSNs and highlight their features.