Various Hierarchical Routing Protocols in Wireless Sensor Network: A Survey

In a hierarchical architecture, higher energy nodes can be used to process and send theinformation while low energy nodes can be used to perform the sensing in the proximity of the target. Thismeans that creation of clusters and assigning special tasks to cluster heads can greatly contribute to overallsystem scalability, lifetime, and energy efficiency. Hierarchical routing is an efficient way to lower energyconsumption within a cluster and by performing data aggregation and fusion in order to decrease thenumber of transmitted messages to the BS. Hierarchical routing is mainly two-layer routing where one layeris used to select cluster heads and the other layer is used for routing. Numbers of routing, powermanagement, and data dissemination protocols have been specifically designed for WSNs where energyawareness is an essential design issue. The focus has been given to the hierarchical routing protocols whichmight differ depending on the application and network architecture. In this paper we discuss some of thehierarchical routing protocols that give an overview of different hierarchical routing strategies which is usedin WSN and their performance is compared based on metrics such as localization, data aggregation, powerusage.