A Survey of Cluster-based Routing Schemes for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

In recent times, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have become progressively more attractive and have found their way into a wide variety of applications and systems because of their low cost, self-organizing behavior, and sensing ability in harsh environments. A WSN is a collection of nodes organized into a network. Routing is a vital technology in WSNs and can be roughly divided into two categories: flat routing and hierarchical routing. In a flat routing topology, all nodes have identical functionality and carry out the same task in the network. Nodes in a hierarchical topology do different tasks in WSNs and are usually arranged into clusters. In this paper, a survey on cluster-based routing schemes for WSNs has been done and comparisons made on the basis of performance factors such as latency, scalability, and energy awareness. Strengths and limitations of each scheme are presented, and open issues that must be addressed in the design of cluster-based routing algorithms are discussed.