Abstract
With the advances in micro-electronics, wireless sensor devices have been made much smaller and more integrated, and large-scale wireless sensor networks (WSNs) based the cooperation among the significant amount of nodes have become a hot topic. “Large-scale” means mainly large area or high density of a network. Accordingly the routing protocols must scale well to the network scope extension and node density increases. A sensor node is normally energy-limited and cannot be recharged, and thus its energy consumption has a quite significant effect on the scalability of the protocol. To the best of our knowledge, currently the mainstream methods to solve the energy problem in large-scale WSNs are the hierarchical routing protocols. In a hierarchical routing protocol, all the nodes are divided into several groups with different assignment levels. The nodes within the high level are responsible for data aggregation and management work, and the low level nodes for sensing their surroundings and collecting information. The hierarchical routing protocols are proved to be more energy-efficient than flat ones in which all the nodes play the same role, especially in terms of the data aggregation and the flooding of the control packets. With focus on the hierarchical structure, in this paper we provide an insight into routing protocols designed specifically for large-scale WSNs. According to the different objectives, the protocols are generally classified based on different criteria such as control overhead reduction, energy consumption mitigation and energy balance. In order to gain a comprehensive understanding of each protocol, we highlight their innovative ideas, describe the underlying principles in detail and analyze their advantages and disadvantages. Moreover a comparison of each routing protocol is conducted to demonstrate the differences between the protocols in terms of message complexity, memory requirements, localization, data aggregation, clustering manner and other metrics. Finally some open issues in routing protocol design in large-scale wireless sensor networks and conclusions are proposed.
Highlights
Recent advances in micro-electro-mechanical systems and low power and highly integrated digital electronics have led to the development of micro-sensors
In this paper we present a survey of recent advances in routing protocols for large-scale wireless sensor networks (WSNs), our aim is to provide a full understanding of research challenges in the emerging protocols
We summarize the methods for improving energy efficiency such as control overhead reduction, energy consumption mitigation and energy balance according to their motivation
Summary
Recent advances in micro-electro-mechanical systems and low power and highly integrated digital electronics have led to the development of micro-sensors. In the literature there are numerous and rich works surveying the routing protocols for WSNs from different points of view and with different concerns They all analyze the strengths and weaknesses of the respective routing protocols, but none of the papers has focused on the scalability objective of the protocols especially designed for large-scale WSNs. For instance, Al-Karaki et al in [1] presented a comprehensive survey of routing techniques which are classified based on the network structure and protocol operation respectively, and outlined challenges and future research directions in this aspect. In this paper we will give an insight into the hierarchical protocols designed especially for large-scale WSNs and compare their advantages and disadvantages in metrics like message complexity, memory requirement, cluster formation and maintenance, data aggregation, energy consumption, network lifetime, end-to-end delay etc.
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