2014 International Conference on Computer Communication and Informatics (ICCCI -2014), Jan.

03 05, 2014, Coimbatore, INDIA

Comparative Analysis on Routing Protocols in

Wireless Sensor Networks
.

TamilSelviGnanasekaran1,

Sharmila Anand John Francis 2

Department of computer Applications,

Karunya University,
Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, India
tamilselvi@karunya.edu

Department of computer Applications,

Karunya University,
Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, India.
Sharmila@karunya.edu

Abstract A Wireless Sensor Network consists of sensor

nodes distributed over the region that communicate
among them through the wireless medium. Wireless
Sensor Network must be managed automatically with
minimum number of human intervention and changes its
state by maintaining its quality. The important feature of
sensor network is the data collection. Each sensor node
has the ability to gather information, analyze that
information and route them to a designated location.
Routing algorithm plays a major role in routing the
packets to the sink point. A survey of routing protocols
has done in this paper using various performance metrics
viz, energy consumption, data aggregation , scalability ,
computation overhead, data delivery model, network
lifetime, optimal route of the wireless sensor networks.

weather condition in a specified environment. Each of

these nodes has the ability to collect data and to route
the data back to the base station.
The size of the sensor should be very small and
its coverage should be larger with minimum energy
consumption. Sensor node should save the energy to
avoid depletion of energy in the node. The number of
nodes distributed in the network should be optimum to
enhance the network lifetime. The range of the sensor
node should be more with the less consumption of
energy.
.

Key words: Wireless Sensor Networks, Routing Protocols,

Data Aggregation, mobility, Data Sink.

I.INTRODUCTION
A wireless sensor networks consists of number
of sensor nodes distributed over the geographical area.
The sensor nodes has the capability to work together
for collecting data, analyze them to avoid redundancy
and route them to the desired destination. The sensor
nodes are operated by battery power. The energy
consumption of the sensor node should be managed
intelligently in order to rise the lifetime of the
network. The collected data should be delivered to the
user with less amount of time delay. All sensor nodes
must forward the collected data to the base station
either directly or indirectly through the gateway by
means of routing algorithm. The routing protocols aim
on minimum energy consumption, low redundancy
and delay. Routing protocols are particularly intended
to concentrate on the mobile networks. It is of two
categories namely proactive routing protocol and
reactive routing protocol. The proactive routing
protocols keep track on routes to all destination. The
reactive routing protocols obtain routes on demand.
The failure of sensor nodes should not affect the
overall task of the whole network. Sensor network
routing protocols should be scalable ample to react to
its changing environment.
Architecture of sensor network is shown in
Fig.1. The sensor field consists of number of sensor
nodes. The node depicts high quality information on

978-1-4799-2352-6/14/$31.00 2014 IEEE

Fig.1. Architecture of Wireless Sensor Network

II.APPLICATIONS OF WIRELESS SENSOR

NETWORKS
The wireless sensor networks have used in variety of
applications. Some of the applications are

Environment / habitat monitoring

Acoustic detection

2014 International Conference on Computer Communication and Informatics (ICCCI -2014), Jan. 03 05, 2014, Coimbatore, INDIA

Seismic Detection

Military surveillance

Inventory tracking

Medical monitoring

Smart spaces

Process Monitoring

Biomedical

Forest fire detection

Infrastructure security.
III ROUTING PROTOCOLS IN WIRELESS
SENSOR NETWORK

The Sensor node collects or senses the data from

the environment and processes that information and
transmits to the specific location. The routing protocol
plays the major task to setup the paths between the
sensor node and the data sink. The path selection must
be such that the life time of the network is maximized.
The characteristic of the environment within which
sensor nodes typically operate, with available resource
and energy limitations make the routing very
challenging.
The routing in wireless sensor networks is a
very difficult task. Since, it has to accommodate
limited processing and communication capabilities of
sensor nodes against the overhead. The overhead can
be measured in terms of bandwidth utilization, power
consumption and processing requirements on the
sensor nodes. The routing protocol imposes a structure
on the network to achieve energy efficiency, stability
and scalability. The network nodes are also organized
in clusters. The node with high residual energy is
assigned as cluster head. The cluster head is
responsible for coordinating activities within the
cluster and forwards the information between the
clusters.
IV CLASSIFICATION OF ROUTING PROTOCOLS
The routing protocols in wireless sensor
networks are classified as

Data centric routing protocol

Location aware routing protocol

Quality of Service based routing protocol

Hierarchical routing protocol

A. Data Centric Routing Protocols:

In data centric routing protocols the sink sends
queries to certain region and waits for the data from
the sensor located region. Here the data is requested
through queries which require the attribute based
query for specifying the property of data. The data is
transmitted from all sensor nodes in the geographical
region with considerable redundancy.

B. Location Aware Routing Protocols:

Location aware routing protocol utilizes the
location information to transmit the data to the desired
regions rather than the whole network. It selects the
next hop towards the destination based on the known
position of the neighbors and the destination.
C. Quality of Service based Routing Protocols:
Qos based routing protocol means the quality of
service required by the application. It could be the
lifetime, reliability, and efficient energy utilization and
location information. These factors involve in
selection of routing protocols for particular
application.
D. Hierarchical based routing protocols
Hierarchical based routing protocol groups
different node as a cluster. High energy residual
energy node is considered as cluster head. Cluster
head is responsible for data aggregation, forwarding
and electing the next cluster head.
V. EVALUATION ON ROUTING PROTOCOLS
Several routing protocols are evaluated based on
performance metrics. The performance metrics are
Efficient Energy utilization and data aggregation, high
scalability, less computation overhead, good data
delivery model, increasing lifetime of a network, and
efficient optimal path with node mobility
A. Low-Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy
LEACH [25] is hierarchical and Node Centric
Routing Protocol [2]. It is a clustering based protocol
to collect data from wireless networks. The cluster
heads are elected from the sensor nodes to transmit the
collected data to the base station. It uses high energy
for transmission because all the nodes in the network
are consistent and power inhibited.
The cluster head aggregates, compresses and
transmit the data to the base station. This protocol
requires no global knowledge of the network. It uses
single hop routing where each node can transmit
directly to the cluster head or the sink node. It can
achieve good scalability and low network overhead. It
uses complex query data delivery model [5] for
transmitting data. The lifetime of the network is very
good for LEACH routing protocols.
B. Sensor Protocol for information via Negotiation.
SPIN [22] [24] is adaptive routing protocol for
data dissemination in Wireless Sensor Networks.
Nodes negotiate with each other before transmitting
the data. Negotiation helps to transmitting only useful
information there by consuming less energy. It is a
flat- source initiated routing protocol. When a new
data is collected by the source node, it broadcasts the
ADV message to all its neighborhood nodes. The node
that wants the data from source sends request message
to the source node. Then the source node broadcasts
the required data to its neighborhood node.

2014 International Conference on Computer Communication and Informatics (ICCCI -2014), Jan. 03 05, 2014, Coimbatore, INDIA

C. Energy Aware Routing Protocol.

Energy aware [4] is a reactive routing protocol
for data aggregation in Wireless Sensor Networks.
This protocol maintains node table to store
neighborhood information. The neighborhood
information is exchanged among the nodes
periodically. If any event occurs in a node, its adjacent
node selects the source node for data aggregation.
Then the source node broadcasts the aggregated data
to the data sink. The energy consumption in a network
is reduced and provides excellent scalability to
accomplish good network life time.
D. SPAN
SPAN [23] is a hierarchical and location based
protocol. It elects the coordinator node from all nodes
in the network to perform data aggregation. The
coordinator node should alive continuously and has to
forward the packet to its destination. The other nodes
in the networks act as a power saver node. The power
saver node is in wakeup state if an event occurs
otherwise it remains in the sleep state.
It increases the life time of a network without
affecting the significant loss and increased latency. It
is a proactive routing protocol and consumes less
energy by incorporating sleep and wakeup technique.
The data aggregation is performed by the coordinator
node to achieve limited scalability. This protocol has
low computation overhead, event driven data delivery
model for efficient energy utilization.
E. Rumor Routing
Rumor Routing [7] is a flat and Data Centric
Routing protocol. Each node maintains the list of
adjacent nodes and the event table with forwarding
information. Any node can create the query. The sink
node generates a query associated to an event occurred
and transmit the query to the destination node. Once
the query reaches the destination node, the node then
transmits the data to the queried node. According to
the amount of data transmitted from source node to the
destination node the shortest path is derived by the
originator node. Rumor routing uses agents. The
agents will have limited life time and create paths in
the direction of any event that may come across.
Rumor Routing is possible to attain a high delivery
rate. It is best algorithm to operate on the available
power. It affords superior scalability and better data
aggregation.
F. Geographic Adaptive Fidelity.
GAF [13] is an energy aware location based
routing protocol. This protocol saves the energy within
the network without affecting the level of routing
fidelity. One of the nodes is selected to stay in active
state for certain amount of time and then go to sleep
state. The active node is responsible for monitoring
and forwarding data to the sink on behalf of the
network. Each node uses its GPS to indicate its
location. Once the active nodes time expires one of the
sleeping nodes becomes the active node and the active
node becomes sleep node. It determines its
neighboring nodes during discovery state. This uses

Virtual grid model for data delivery to utilize energy

efficiently.
G. Joint mobility and routing
Joint mobility and routing is a flat and Mobility
[9] based routing protocol. Here the sensor nodes
disseminated arbitrarily in the surroundings. Joint
mobility and routing algorithm partition the network
area into two parts, inside the concentric circle and the
other as outside the concentric circle. The sink node
prefers the shortest path and transmits the data; if the
sink is surrounded by the concentric circle otherwise
send out in clockwise and anti-clock wise until it
reaches the target. It supports event driven data
gathering mechanism. Computational overhead of the
sensor nodes within the concentric circle is especially
large. It achieves limited scalability. The network
lifetime is narrow. Joint mobility and routing protocol
attain optimal route.
H. Small Minimum Energy Communication Network
SMECN [14] is an extension of Minimum
Energy Communication Network. It computes an
energy efficient cluster. SMECN protocol is self
reconfiguring and it can dynamically adapt to node
failures. It operates on less energy and maintenance
cost is small. Each sensor node determines its
immediate neighbors by broadcasting neighbor
message using some initial power that is updated
incrementally. It generates energy efficient path
between the neighbor nodes .The path has the cost in
terms of energy consumption over all possible paths
between the pair of sensors. The path is established
with respect to least amount of energy property.
I .Power Efficient Gathering in Sensor Information
Systems
PEGASIS [17] is an optimal chain based routing
protocol. It is an enhancement of LEACH protocol.
Here each node communicates only with a close
neighbor and obtain turns in transmitting information
to the base station. It utilizes less energy per round for
transmitting information. It forms a chain among the
sensor nodes so each node will accept the data and
convey it to its close neighbor. Each node collect data
from one neighbor, fuses with its own data and
transmits to the other neighbor on the chain.
Once it reaches the designated node it will
transmit it to the base station. It performs data fusion
at every node except the end node in the chain. Nodes
are allocated for transmitting to the base station evenly
so the average energy depleted by each node. It
eliminates the overhead of dynamic cluster formation.
Energy load distributed among the nodes which
increases the lifetime and the quality of the network.
J. Adaptive Periodic Threshold Sensitive Energy
Efficient Sensor Network Protocol
APTEEN [19] protocol is developed for hybrid
networks. It combines proactive and reactive routing
protocol. The cluster head broadcasts hard and soft
threshold values and the transmission list to all the
nodes within the cluster.

2014 International Conference on Computer Communication and Informatics (ICCCI -2014), Jan. 03 05, 2014, Coimbatore, INDIA

Routing
Prot
ocol
s
LEACH

SPIN
Energy
Aware
SPAN
Rumor
Routing
GAF

Classification

Energy
Consumption

Data
Aggregati
on

Scalabili
ty

Overhead

Data Delivery
Model

Network
lifetime

Optimal
Route

Hierarchical
,Destination
Initiated & Node
Centric
Flat , Source
Initiated & Data
Centric
Event Driven

High

Yes

Good

Low

Complex
query

Very Good

No

Limited

Yes

Limited

Low

Event Driven

Good

No

Low

Yes

Good

Moderate

Event Driven

Very Good

No

Hierarchical
&
Location Based
Flat&
Data
Centric
Hierarchical
&
Location Based
Flat/
Mobility
Based

Limited

Yes

Limited

High

Continuously

Good

No

Low

Yes

Good

Low

Good

Yes

Limited

No

Good

Moderate

Demand
Driven
Virtual Grid

Good

No

High

No

Limited

High

Event Driven

Limited

Yes

Hierarchical
Hierarchical

Limited
High

No
No

Limited
Good

High
Moderate

Cluster based
Chain Based

Limited
Very Good

Yes
Yes

Active
Threshold
Weight Based
Layered
approach
Continuously

Good

No

Good
Good

No
Yes

Moderate

No

Joint
Mobility
&
Routing
SMECN
PEGASI
S
APTEE
N
HEED
SEAD

Hierarchical

High

Yes

Good

High

Hierarchical
Hierarchical

Limited
Limited

Yes
Yes

Low
Moderate

CADR

Flat

N to 1
Multipat
h
Routing
SAR

Multipath

Limited/
Data Centric
Limited

Good
Moderat
e
Limited

Yes

Moderat
e

High

Convergecast
traffic model

Moderate

Yes

High

Yes

Limited

High

Continuously

Good

Yes

Limited

Yes

Limited

Low

Demand
Driven

Good

Yes

Directed
Diffusio
n

Data Centric/ QoS

Based
Flat
&Data
Centric

Table I ROUTING PROTOCOLS IN WIRELESS SENSOR

NETWORKS

The node senses the surroundings continuously.

The sensed data will transmit only when the values of
the attribute altered by an amount equal to or greater
than the soft threshold. TDMA schedule is used for
conveying the transmission slot. It affords enhanced
network life time. It faces difficulty on forming
clusters at multiple levels and the process of
implementing threshold based functions.
K .Hybrid Energy Efficient Distributed Clustering
Protocol
HEED [6] protocol is developed for hybrid
routing
protocol.
The
cluster
heads
are
probabilistically elected based on their residual
energy. Nodes are formed as clusters which reduces
the communication cost. It terminates in constant
number of iterations. It incurs less communication
overhead. It achieves fairly uniform cluster head
distribution across the network. It utilizes the
availability of multiple transmission power levels at
sensor nodes. It extends the network lifetime. It
affords better scalability, fault tolerance and load
balancing.

Low

L. Scalable Energy Efficient Asynchronous

Dissemination
SEAD [18] is a self organizing routing protocol.
It is a hierarchical routing protocol. It reduces the
forwarding delay. It is a location aware routing
protocol. It focused on energy saving rather than data
delivery. A sensor network is distributed on a virtual
plane with the multiple sinks and sources. Sensor
nodes communicate with the data sink by transmitting
data across multiple hops. It is robust and reliable
protocol. It is capable to avoid imperfect region and
locate new path between source and data sink. It does
not sustain multiple routes. It is a scalable routing
protocol. It uses limited energy. Data aggregation is
takes place in the source node.
M. Constrained Anisotropic Diffusion Routing
CADR [21] is a flat routing protocol. Each node
evaluates information and path based on the local
information. It distributes the queries by a set of
information criteria to select the sensor to gather
information. The information criteria are modeled
using standard estimation theory. It is an energy
efficient routing protocol. Its main objective is to
maximize the information gain and minimize the
latency and bandwidth.

2014 International Conference on Computer Communication and Informatics (ICCCI -2014), Jan. 03 05, 2014, Coimbatore, INDIA

N. N to 1 Multipath Routing Protocol

N to 1 Multipath routing protocol is proposed
according to converge cast traffic model of wireless
Sensor networks [11]. It concurrently discovers
multiple node disjoint paths from all sensor nodes
towards a sink node. All intermediate nodes use a
packet salvaging technique at each hop to improve
data transmission reliability. Routing operations
performed through flooding technique. It is initialized
in order to discover more paths from each sensor
node with multipath extension flooding technique. The
source node splits the traffic into several segments.
The segments are distributed over discovered paths. It
operates single path forwarding strategy for
transmitting each data segment.
All the other nodes uses adaptive per hop packet
salvaging technique for fast recovery from node
failures. It improves the reliability of packet delivery.
O. Sequential Assignment Routing
SAR [27] is a table- driven multi-path approach
determined to accomplish energy efficiency and fault
tolerance. It generate trees rooted at one- hop
neighbors of the sink by taking Qos metric, energy
resource on each path and priority level of each packet
into consideration. Multiple paths from sink to sensor
nodes are created according to the created trees. One
of the paths is preferred according to the energy
resource and Qos on the path. It offers less power
consumption. It focuses only on energy consumption
of each packet without considering its priority. It
ensures fault tolerance and easy recovery. It suffers
from computational overhead on maintaining the
tables and states at each sensor nodes.
P. Directed Diffusion
Directed Diffusion is a data centric routing
protocol [25]. Data diffused through sensor nodes by
using a name scheme for the data. It uses attribute
value pairs for the data and queries the sensor on
demand basis.
Here an interest is defined by using attribute
value pair such as name of the object, interval,
duration, location, etc. An interest is broadcast by the
sink node through its neighbors. The nodes have
capability to do in-network data aggregation. When an
existing path between the source and the sink fails a
new path will be identified. All the communication
can established between neighbor to neighbor nodes. It
is highly energy efficient. It is a query based data
delivery model. It achieves good network lifetime and
limited scalability.
VI. CONCLUSION
This paper begins with the introduction of Wireless
Sensor Networks. Then it gives an overview of the
design objectives of Wireless Sensor Networks. And
some of the design objectives are identified and
compared with Routing protocols. Frequent
modification on node placement requires more energy
consumption. It is identified that the efficient energy
utilization and optimal path can be achieved by

hierarchical routing algorithms while comparing with

other routing algorithms.
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