Hierarchical Routing Protocols in Wireless Sensor Networks

In recent wireless sensor network research, using a mobile data center (sink) to collect data has shown the ability to decrease the overall energy expenditure of the sensor field. Before the introduction of mobile sinks, many different routing protocols were developed under the assumption of a stationary sink. This work compares three such routing protocols, one hierarchical and two non-hierarchical, under the assumption of a mobile sink to determine which is best. The three protocols are tested against varying sink speed, node communication radius, and sensor field node populations. Different sink movement strategies and modifica-tions to the routing protocols are also evaluated. This work shows that a modified Directed Diffusion, a non-hierarchical routing protocol, performs slightly better on average than a modified TEEN, a hierarchical routing protocol