A Survey on Energy-Efficient Hierarchical Routing Techniques in Wireless Sensor Networks

The recent advances in technology has led to the development of low-cost, very small, battery powered, wireless communication capability devices called sensor nodes. Sensor nodes of these networks have limited energy, limited bandwidth and limited computing power, in which energy is a major problem. Hence, there is a need to design energy-efficient routing techniques to route the data efficiently in the wireless sensor networks. The routing techniques are mainly classified into three categories namely flat or data-centric routing, hierarchical routing, and location-based routing and among all these, hierarchical routing is the most energy efficient technique. Hierarchical routing, in which, a network is divided into clusters, electing cluster head to each cluster which collects data from their cluster members and transmits the aggregated data to the base station. Hence, this technique is energy efficient which increases lifetime of the network with decreasing the energy consumption and bandwidth usage. In this paper, the authors are surveying the high energy-efficient hierarchical routing protocols which maximize the network longevity.