Study of Routing Protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks consist of plenty of nodes, which sense, compute and transmit certain physical quantities. These quantities are then transmitted to a recording station for obtaining inferences from the readings taken by those sensor nodes. For WSNs to work, connection & communication between nodes become important and thus, different routing techniques were proposed. The two main hurdles in designing a routing technique are -power management of the nodes and transmission speed of the nodes. Keeping in mind these two major problems, numerous routing protocols were given which depend upon the application and network topology. Out of the various routing protocols, LEACH (Low-Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy) is one which belongs to hierarchal based routing techniques. Simulation of LEACH [1] protocol and its comparison with simple direct transmission method has been done on MATLAB-R2017a. From the results and the graphs obtained, it can be clearly understood that former is much better than the latter. In terms of network lifetime, first node death, transmission speed, data aggregation and on many other parameters, LEACH protocol, as in [1], outperforms basic direct routing protocol.