A Review Routing Techniques in Wireless Sensor Networks

Prof. Partha Ghosh Amit Jain Dept. of Information Technology Netaji Subhash Engineering College Garia, Kolkata:-700132, India Email: - {partha1812, itskingjain} @gmail.com

Abstract: The rapid progress of wireless communication and the availability of many small-sized, lightweighted and low-cost communication and computing devices nowadays have greatly impacted the development of wireless sensor network. Localization using sensor network has attracted much attention for its comparable low-cost and potential use with monitoring and targeting purposes in real and hostile application scenarios. Most of the attention, however, has been given to the routing protocols since they might differ depending on the application and network architecture. This paper surveys recent routing protocols for sensor networks and presents a classification for the various approaches pursued. The three main categories explored in this paper are data-centric, hierarchical and location-based. Each routing protocol is described and discussed under the appropriate category. Introduction: A Wireless Sensor Network consists of a number of sensors spread across a geographical area. Each sensor has wireless communication capability and some level of intelligence for signal processing and networking of the data. These sensor nodes can sense, measure, and gather information from the environment and, based on some local decision process, they can transmit the sensed data to the user. Smart sensor nodes are low power devices equipped with one or more sensors, a processor, memory, a power supply, a radio, and an actuator 1.

Sensors
Generic Gateway

Available sensors in the market include generic (multi-purpose) nodes and gateway (bridge) nodes. A generic (multi-purpose) sensor nodes task is to take measurements from the monitored environment. It may be equipped with a variety of devices which can measure various physical attributes such as light, temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, velocity, acceleration, acoustics, magnetic field, etc. Gateway (bridge) nodes gather data from generic sensors and relay them to the base station. Gateway nodes have higher processing capability, battery power, and transmission (radio) range. A combination of generic and gateway nodes is typically deployed to form a WSN.

1An actuator is an electro-mechanical device that can be used to control different components in a system. In a sensor node, actuators can actuate different sensing devices, adjust sensor parameters, move the sensor, or monitor power in the sensor node.

Components of Sensor Node. Architecture of Wireless Sensor Network: A WSN typically has little or no infrastructure. It consists of a number of sensor nodes (few tens to thousands) working together to monitor a region to obtain data about the environment. There are two types of WSNs: Unstructured Structured. An unstructured WSN is one that contains a dense collection of sensor nodes. Sensor nodes may be deployed in an ad hoc manner2 into the field. Once deployed, the network is left unattended to perform monitoring and reporting functions. In an unstructured WSN, network maintenance such as managing connectivity and detecting failures is difficult since there are so many nodes. In a structured WSN, all or some of the sensor nodes are deployed in a pre-planned manner3. The advantage of a structured network is that fewer nodes can be deployed with lower network maintenance and management cost. Fewer nodes can be deployed now since nodes are placed at specific locations to provide coverage while ad hoc deployment can have uncovered regions. Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks: Routing is the process of selecting paths in a network along which to send network traffic. A Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) contain hundreds or thousands of sensor nodes. These sensors have the ability to communicate either among each other or directly to an external base-station (BS).

2 In ad hoc deployment, sensor nodes may be randomly placed into the field 3 In pre-planned deployment, sensor nodes are pre-determined to be placed at fixed locations.

Challenges in WSN Routing:In WSN, the routing protocols are application specific, data centric, capable of aggregating data and capable of optimizing energy consumption. The important characteristics of a good routing protocol for WSN are simplicity, energy awareness, adaptability and scalability due to limited energy supply, limited computation power, limited memory and limited bandwidth of WSN. The main design goal of WSNs is to carry out data communication while trying to prolong the lifetime of the network .The design of routing protocol in WSNs is influenced by many challenging factors as summarized below. Node deployment: Node deployment in WSNs is application dependent and affects the performance of the routing protocol. The deployment is either deterministic (manual) or self-organizing (random). In deterministic situations, the sensors are manually placed and data is routed through pre-determined paths. Whereas in selforganizing systems, the sensor nodes are scattered randomly creating an infrastructure in an ad hoc manner. The position of the sink or the cluster-head is very crucial in terms of energy efficiency and performance. When the distribution of nodes is not uniform, optimal clustering becomes a necessity to enable energy efficient network operation. In some applications like battle field and wildlife monitoring, sensor nodes are randomly deployed like being dropped from an airplane. Network dynamics: Most of the network architectures assume that sensor nodes are stationary, because there are very few setups that utilize mobile sensors. It is sometimes necessary to support the mobility of sinks or cluster-heads (gateways). Route stability becomes an important optimization factor, in addition to energy, bandwidth etc. as communication from moving nodes is more challenging. Further, the sensed event can also be either dynamic or static depending on the application.

Energy Conservation: During the creation of an infrastructure, the process of setting up the routes is greatly influenced by energy considerations. Since the transmission power of a wireless radio is proportional to distance squared or even higher order in the presence of obstacles, multi-hop routing will consume less energy than direct communication. However, multi-hop routing introduces significant overhead for topology management and medium access control. Direct routing would perform well enough if all the nodes were very close to the sink. Most of the time sensors are scattered randomly over an area of interest and multi-hop routing becomes unavoidable. Fault Tolerance: If sensor nodes fail, MAC and routing protocols must accommodate formation of new links so that sensor node failure should not affect the overall task of the sensor network. Scalability: The number of sensor node in the target area may be on the order of hundreds or thousands, or more so protocols should be able to scale to such high

degree and take advantage of the high density of such networks. Production Costs: The cost of a single node must be low. Hardware Constraint: All Subunits of sensor node (e.g. sensing, processing, communication, power, location finding system and mobilizer) must consume extremely low power and be contained within an extremely small volume. Sensor network topology: It must be maintained even with very high node density Environment: Nodes should be operating in inaccessible location because of hostile environment. Transmission Media: Generally, Transmission Media is wireless (RF or Infrared), which is affected by fading and high error rate and affect the operation of WSNs. Data delivery models: Data delivery model to the sink can be continuous, event driven, query-driven and hybrid, depending on the application of the sensor network. In the continuous delivery model, each sensor sends data periodically. In event-driven and query-driven models, the transmission of data is triggered when an event occurs or the sink generates a query. Some networks apply a hybrid model using a combination of continuous, event-driven and query-driven data delivery. The routing protocol is highly influenced by the data delivery model, especially with regard to the minimization of energy consumption and route stability. Node capabilities: In a sensor network, different functionalities can be associated with the sensor nodes. Depending on the application a node can be dedicated to a particular special function such as relaying, sensing and aggregation since engaging the three functionalities at the same time on a node might quickly drain the energy of that node. Data aggregation/fusion: Data aggregation is the combination of data from different sources by using functions such as suppression (eliminating duplicates), min, max and average. Similar packets from multiple nodes can be aggregated to reduce the transmission. Classification of Routing Technics in WSN:In general, routing in WSNs can be divided into Flat-Based Routing, Hierarchical-Based Routing, and Location-Based Routing depending on the network structure. In flat-based routing, all nodes are typically assigned equal roles or functionality.

In hierarchical-based routing, however, nodes will play different roles in the network. In location-based routing, sensor nodes' positions are exploited to route data in the network. A routing protocol is considered adaptive if certain system parameters can be controlled in order to adapt to the current network conditions and available energy levels. Furthermore, these protocols can be classified into multipath-based, query-based, negotiation-based, QoS-based, or coherent-based routing techniques depending on the protocol operation. In addition to the above, routing protocols can be classified into three categories, namely, proactive, reactive, and hybrid protocols depending on how the source finds a route to the destination. In proactive protocols, all routes are computed before they are really needed, while in reactive protocols, routes are computed on demand. Hybrid protocols use a combination of these two ideas. When sensor nodes are static, it is preferable to have table driven routing protocols rather than using reactive protocols. A significant amount of energy is used in route discovery and setup of reactive protocols. Another class of routing protocols is called the cooperative routing protocols. In cooperative routing, nodes send data to a central node where data can be aggregated and may be subject to further processing, hence reducing route cost in terms of energy use. Many other protocols rely on timing and position information. We also shed some light on these types of protocols in this paper. In order to streamline this survey, we use a classification according to the network structure and protocol operation (routing criteria).

WSN Routing

Network Based Routing

Protocol Based Routing

Flat Network Routing

Hierarchical Network Routing

Location Based Routing

Multi-Path Based

Flooding & Gossiping

LEACH

GAF

Negotiation Based

SPIN

PEGASIS

GEAR

Query Based

Directed Diffusion

TEEN & APTEEN

MECN

QoS Based

Rumor Routing

SOP

SMECN

Coherent & Non-Coherent Based

Energy Aware Routing

MCFA

COUGAR

ACQUIRE

1. Network Structure Based Protocol: - The underlying network structure can play significant role in the operation of the routing protocol in WSNs. In this section, we survey in details most of the protocols that fall below this category. 1.1. Flat Network Routing: - The first category of routing protocols are the multihop flat routing protocols. In flat networks, each node typically plays the same role and sensor nodes collaborate together to perform the sensing task. Due to the large number of such nodes, it is not feasible to assign a global identifier to each node. This consideration has led to data centric routing, where the BS sends queries to certain regions and waits for data from the sensors located in the selected regions. Since data is being requested through queries, attribute-based naming is necessary to specify the properties of data. Early works on data centric routing, e.g., SPIN and directed diffusion were shown to save energy through data negotiation and elimination of redundant data. These two protocols motivated the design of many other protocols which follow a similar concept. In the rest of this subsection, we summarize these protocols and highlight their advantages and their performance issues. 1.1.1. Flooding & Gossiping: - Flooding and gossiping are two classical mechanisms to relay data in sensor networks without the need for any routing algorithms and topology maintenance. In flooding, each sensor receiving a data packet broadcasts it to all of its neighbors and this process continues until the packet arrives at the destination or the maximum number of hops for the packet is reached. On the other hand, gossiping is a slightly enhanced version of flooding where the receiving node sends the packet to a randomly selected neighbor, which picks another random neighbor to forward the packet to and so on. Although flooding is very easy to implement, it has several drawbacks. Such drawbacks (shown in the figure) include implosion caused by duplicated messages sent to same node (Node A starts by flooding its data to all of its neighbors. D gets two same copies of data eventually, which is not necessary.), overlap when two nodes sensing the same region send similar packets to the same neighbor and resource blindness by consuming large amount of energy without consideration for the energy constraints(Two sensors cover an overlapping geographic region and C gets same copy of data form these sensors.). Gossiping avoids the problem of implosion by just selecting a random node to send the packet rather than broadcasting. However, this cause delays in propagation of data through the nodes. 1.1.2. SPIN: -Sensor Protocol for Information via Negotiation (SPIN) protocol was designed to improve classic flooding protocols and overcome the problems they may cause, for example, implosion and overlap. The SPIN protocols are resource aware and resource adaptive. The sensors running the SPIN protocols are able to compute the energy consumption required to compute, send, and receive data over the network. Thus, they can make informed decisions for efficient use of their own resources. The SPIN protocols are based on two key mechanisms namely negotiation and resource adaptation. SPIN enables the sensors to negotiate with each other

before any data dissemination can occur in order to avoid injecting non-useful and redundant information in the network. SPIN uses meta-data as the descriptors of the data that the sensors want to disseminate. The notion of meta-data avoids the occurrence of overlap given sensors can name the interesting portion of the data they want to get. It may be noted here that the size of the meta-data should definitely be less than that of the corresponding sensor data. Contrary to the flooding technique, each sensor is aware of its resource consumption with the help of its own resource manager that is probed by the application before any data processing or transmission. This helps the sensors to monitor and adapt to any change in their own resources.

There are two protocols in the SPIN family: SPIN-l (or SPIN-PP) and SPIN-2 (or SPIN-EC). While SPIN-l uses a negotiation mechanism to reduce the consumption of the sensors, SPIN-2 uses a resource-aware mechanism for energy savings. Both protocols allow the sensors to exchange information about their sensed data, thus helping them to obtain the data they are interested in. SPIN-l is a three-stage handshake protocol by which the sensors can disseminate their data. This protocol applies for those networks using point-to-point transmission media (or point-topoint networks), in which two sensors can communicate exclusively with each other without interfering with other sensors. SPIN-BC improves SPIN-PP by using oneto-many communication instead of many one-to-one communications. It is a threestage handshake protocol for broadcast transmission media, where the sensors in a network communicate with each other using a single shared channel. SPIN-2 differs from SPIN-l in that it takes into account the residual energy of sensors. If the sensors have plenty of energy, SPIN-2 is identical to SPIN-l, and hence has the same three stages. However, when a sensor has low residual energy, it controls its participation in a data dissemination process. While the family of SPIN protocols applies to lossless networks, it can be slightly updated to apply to lossy or mobile networks. 1.1.3. Directed Diffusion (DD):- Directed diffusion is a data-centric routing protocol for sensor query dissemination and processing. It meets the main requirements of WSNs such as energy efficiency, scalability, and robustness. Directed diffusion has several key elements namely data naming, interests and gradients, data propagation, and reinforcement. A sensing task can be described by a list of attribute-value pairs. At the beginning of the directed diffusion process, the sink specifies a low data rate for incoming events. After that, the sink can reinforce one particular sensor to send events with a higher data rate by resending the original interest message with a

smaller interval. Likewise, if a neighboring sensor receives this interest message and finds that the sender's interest has a higher data rate than before, and this data rate is higher than that of any existing gradient, it will reinforce one or more of its neighbors. Directed Diffusion differs from SPIN in terms of the on demand data querying mechanism it has. In Directed Diffusion the sink queries the sensor nodes if a specific data is available by flooding some tasks. In SPIN, sensors advertise the availability of data allowing interested nodes to query that data. Directed Diffusion has many advantages. Since it is data centric, all communication is neighbor-to-neighbor with no need for a node addressing mechanism. Each node can do aggregation and caching, in addition to sensing. Caching is a big advantage in terms of energy efficiency and delay. In addition, Direct Diffusion is highly energy efficient since it is on demand and there is no need for maintaining global network topology. However, Directed Diffusion cannot be applied to all sensor network applications since it is based on a querydriven data delivery model. The applications that require continuous data delivery to the sink will not work efficiently with a Sink query-driven on demand data model Therefore, Directed Diffusion is not a good choice as a routing protocol for the applications such as environmental monitoring. 1.1.4. Rumor Routing (RR):- Rumor routing is a logical compromise between query flooding and event flooding app schemes. Rumor routing is an efficient protocol if the number of queries is between the two intersection points of the curve of rumor routing with those of query flooding and event flooding. Rumor routing is based on the concept of agent, which is a long-lived packet that traverses a network and informs each sensor it encounters about the events that it has learned during its network traverse. An agent will travel the network for a certain number of hops and then die. Each sensor, including the agent, maintains an event list that has eventdistance pairs, where every entry in the list contains the event and the actual distance in the number of hops to that event from the currently visited sensor. Therefore, when the agent encounters a sensor on its path, it synchronizes its event list with that of the sensor it has encountered. Also, the sensors that hear the agent update their event lists according to that of the agent in order to maintain the shortest paths to

the events that occur in the network.

1.1.5. Energy Aware Routing: - The objective of energy-aware routing protocol, a destination initiated reactive protocol, is to increase the network lifetime. Although this protocol is similar to directed diffusion, it differs in the sense that it maintains a set of paths instead of maintaining or enforcing one optimal path at higher rates. These paths are maintained and chosen by means of a certain probability. The value of this probability depends on how low the energy consumption of each path can be achieved. By having paths chosen at different times, the energy of any single path will not deplete quickly. This can achieve longer network lifetime as energy is dissipated more equally among all nodes. Network survivability is the main metric of this protocol. The protocol assumes that each node is addressable through a classbased addressing which includes the location and types of the nodes. The protocol initiates a connection through localized flooding, which is used to discover all routes between source/destination pair and their costs; thus building up the routing tables. The high-cost paths are discarded and a forwarding table is built by choosing neighboring nodes in a manner that is proportional to their cost. Then, forwarding tables are used to send data to the destination with a probability that is inversely proportional to the node cost. Localized flooding is performed by the destination node to keep the paths alive. When compared to directed diffusion, this protocol provides an overall improvement of 21.5% energy saving and a 44% increase in network lifetime. However, the approach requires gathering the location information and setting up the addressing mechanism for the nodes, which complicate route setup compared to the directed diffusion. 1.1.6. COUGAR: - The cougar routing protocol is a database approach to tasking sensor networks. The Cougar approach provides a user and application programs with declarative queries of the sensed data generated by the source sensors. These queries are suitable for WSNs in that they abstract the user from knowing the execution plan of its queries. In other words, the user does not know which sensors are contacted,

how sensed data are processed to compute the queries, and how final results are sent to the user. The Cougar approach uses a query layer where every sensor is associated with a query proxy that lies between the network layer and application layer of the sensor. This query proxy provides higher level services through queries that can be issued from a gateway node. Furthermore, the Cougar approach employs in-network processing to reduce the total energy consumption and enhance the network lifetime. .Cougar is more beneficial if a set of sensed data could be aggregated or fused into a single one that is more representative and thus significant to the user. The cougar being database approach, it faces few challenges. A network can be viewed as a huge distributed database stem, where every sensor possesses a subset of data. Hence, current distributed management approaches cannot be applied directly, but need to be modified accordingly. 1.1.7. AQUIRE: - ACtive QUery forwarding In sensoR nEtworks (ACQUIRE) is another data-centric querying mechanism used for querying named data. It provides superior query optimization to answer specific types of queries, called one-shot complex queries for replicated data. ACQUIRE query (i.e., interest for named data) consists of several sub queries for which several simple responses are provided by several relevant sensors. Each sub-query is answered based on the currently stored data at its relevant sensor. ACQUIRE allows a sensor to inject an active query in a network following either a random or a specified trajectory until the query gets answered by some sensors on the path using a localized update mechanism. Unlike other query techniques, ACQUIRE allows the querier to inject a complex query into the network to be forwarded stepwise through a sequence of sensors. 1.1.8. MCFA: - The Minimum Cost Finding Algorithm (MCFA) algorithm exploits the fact that the direction of routing is always known, that is, towards the fixed external base-station. Hence, a sensor node need not have a unique ID nor maintain a routing table. Instead, each node maintains the least cost estimate from itself to the basestation. Each message to be forwarded by the sensor node is broadcast to its neighbors. When a node receives the message, it checks if it is on the least cost path between the source sensor node and the base-station. If this is the case, it rebroadcasts the message to its neighbors. This process repeats until the base-station is reached. In MCFA, each node should know the least cost path estimate from itself to the base-station. This is obtained as follows. The base-station broadcasts a message with the cost set to zero while every node initially set its least cost to the base-station to infinity (). Each node, upon receiving the broadcast message originated at the base-station, checks to see if the estimate in the message plus the link on which it is received is less than the current estimate. If yes, the current estimate and the estimate in the broadcast message are updated. If the received broadcast message is updated, then it is re-sent; otherwise, it is purged and nothing further is done. However, the previous procedure may result in some nodes having multiple updates and those nodes far away from the base-station will get more updates from those closer to the base-station. To avoid this, the MCFA was modified to run a backoff algorithm at the setup phase. The backoff algorithm dictates that a node will not send the updated message until a*lc time units have elapsed from the time at which the message is updated, where a is a constant and lc is the link cost from which the message was

received. 1.2. Hierarchical Network Routing: - Hierarchical or cluster-based routing, originally proposed in wire line networks, are well-known techniques with special advantages related to scalability and efficient communication. As such, the concept of hierarchical routing is also utilized to perform energy-efficient routing in WSNs. In a hierarchical architecture, higher energy nodes can be used to process and send the information while low energy nodes can be used to perform the sensing in the proximity of the target. This means that creation of clusters and assigning special tasks to cluster heads can greatly contribute to overall system scalability, lifetime, and energy efficiency. Hierarchical routing is an efficient way to lower energy consumption within a cluster and by performing data aggregation and fusion in order to decrease the number of transmitted messages to the BS. Hierarchical routing is mainly two-layer routing where one layer is used to select clusterheads and the other layer is used for routing. However, most techniques in this category are not about routing, rather on "who and when to send or process/aggregate" the information, channel allocation etc., which can be orthogonal to the multihop routing function. 1.2.1. LEACH: - Low-Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy (LEACH) is the first and most popular energy-efficient hierarchical clustering algorithm for WSNs that was proposed for reducing power consumption. In LEACH, the clustering task is rotated among the nodes, based on duration. Direct communication is used by each cluster head (CH) to forward the data to the base station (BS). It uses clusters to prolong the life of the wireless sensor network. LEACH is based on an aggregation (or fusion) technique that combines or aggregates the original data into a smaller size of data that carry only meaningful information to all individual sensors. LEACH divides the a network into several cluster of sensors, which are constructed by using localized coordination and control not only to reduce the amount of data that are transmitted to the sink, but also to make routing and data dissemination more scalable and robust. LEACH uses a randomize rotation of high-energy CH position rather than selecting in static manner, to give a chance to all sensors to act as CHs and avoid the battery depletion of an individual sensor and dieing quickly. The operation of LEACH is divided into rounds having two phases each namely (i) a setup phase to organize the network into clusters, CH advertisement, and transmission schedule creation and (ii) a steadystate phase for data aggregation, compression, and transmission to the sink. LEACH is completely distributed

and requires no global knowledge of network. The duration of the steady state phase is longer than the duration of the setup phase in order to minimize the overhead. During the setup phase, a predetermined fraction of nodes, p, elect themselves as CHs as follows. A sensor node chooses a random number, v, between 0 and 1. If this random number is less than a threshold value, T(n), the node becomes a cluster-head for the current round. The threshold value is calculated based on an equation that incorporates the desired percentage to become a cluster-head in the current round from the set of nodes that have not been selected as a cluster-in the last (1/P) rounds. The threshold value is given by:

Each elected CH broadcasts an advertisement message to the rest of the nodes in the network that they are the new cluster-heads. All the non-cluster head nodes, after receiving this advertisement, decide on the cluster to which they want to belong to. This decision is taken based on the signal strength of the advertisement. The noncluster- head nodes inform the appropriate clusterheads that they will be a member of the cluster. After receiving all the messages from the nodes that would like to be included in the cluster and based on the number of nodes in the cluster, the cluster-head node creates a TDMA (i.e., Time Division Multiple Access) schedule and assigns each node a time slot when it can transmit. This schedule is broadcast to all the nodes in the cluster. It reduces energy consumption by (a) minimizing the communication cost between sensors and their cluster heads and (b) turning off nonhead nodes as much as possible. LEACH uses single-hop routing where each node can transmit directly to the cluster-head and the sink. Therefore, it is not applicable to networks deployed in large regions. Furthermore, the idea of dynamic clustering brings extra overhead, e.g. head changes, advertisements etc., which may diminish the gain in energy consumption. While LEACH helps the sensors within their cluster dissipate their energy slowly, the CHs consume a larger amount of energy when they are located farther away from the sink. Also, LEACH clustering terminates in a finite number of iterations, but does not guarantee good CH distribution and assumes uniform energy consumption for CHs. 1.2.2. PEGASIS: - Power-Efficient Gathering in Sensor Information Systems (PEGASIS) is an extension of the LEACH protocol, which forms chains from sensor nodes so that each node transmits and receives from a neighbor and only one node is selected from that chain to transmit to the base station (sink). The data is gathered and moves from node to node, aggregated and eventually sent to the base station. The chain construction is performed in a greedy way. Unlike LEACH, PEGASIS avoids cluster formation and uses only one

node in a chain to transmit to the BS (sink) instead of using multiple nodes. A sensor transmits to its local neighbors in the data fusion phase instead of sending directly to its CH as in the case of LEACH. In PEGASIS routing protocol, the construction phase assumes that all the sensors have global knowledge about the network, particularly, the positions of the sensors, and use a greedy approach. When a sensor fails or dies due to low battery power, the chain is constructed using the same greedy approach by bypassing the failed sensor. In each round, a randomly chosen sensor node from the chain will transmit the aggregated data to the BS, thus reducing the per round energy expenditure compared to LEACH. Simulation results showed that PEGASIS is able to increase the lifetime of the network twice as much the lifetime of the network under the LEACH protocol. Such performance gain is achieved through the elimination of the overhead caused by dynamic cluster formation in LEACH and through decreasing the number of transmissions and reception by using data aggregation. Although the clustering overhead is avoided, PEGASIS still requires dynamic topology adjustment since a sensor node needs to know about energy status of its neighbors in order to know where to route its data. Such topology adjustment can introduce significant overhead especially for highly utilized networks. 1.2.3. TEEN & APTEEN: - In Threshold-sensitive Energy Efficient Protocols (TEEN), sensor nodes sense the medium continuously, but the data transmission is done less frequently. A cluster head sensor sends its members a hard threshold, which is the threshold value of the sensed attribute and a soft threshold, which is a small change in the value of the sensed attribute that triggers the node to switch on its transmitter and transmit. Thus the hard threshold tries to reduce the number of transmissions by allowing the nodes to transmit only when the sensed attribute is in the range of interest. The soft threshold further reduces the number of transmissions that might have otherwise occurred when there is little or no change in the sensed attribute. A smaller value of the soft threshold gives a more accurate picture of the network, at the expense of increased energy consumption. Thus, the user can control the trade-off between energy efficiency and data accuracy. When cluster-heads are to change, new values for the above parameters are broadcast. The main drawback of this scheme is that, if the thresholds are not received, the nodes will never communicate, and the user will not get any data from the network at all. The nodes sense their environment continuously. The first time a parameter from the attribute set reaches its hard threshold value, the node switches its transmitter on and sends the sensed data. The sensed value is stored in an internal variable, called Sensed Value (SV). The nodes will transmit data in the current cluster period only when the following conditions are true: (1) The current value of the sensed attribute is greater than the hard threshold (2) The current value of the sensed attribute differs from SV by an amount equal to or greater than the soft threshold. Important features of TEEN include its suitability for time critical sensing applications. Also, since message transmission consumes more energy than data sensing, so the energy consumption in this scheme is less than the proactive networks. The soft threshold

can be varied. At every cluster change time, a fresh parameters are broadcast and so, the user can change them as required.

In Adaptive Periodic Threshold Sensitive Energy Efficient Sensor Network Protocol(APTEEN), the cluster-heads broadcasts the following parameters (see above figure (b)): 1. Attributes (A): this is a set of physical parameters which the user is interested in obtaining information about. 2. Thresholds: this parameter consists of the Hard Threshold (HT) and the Soft Threshold (ST). 3. Schedule: this is a TDMA schedule, assigning a slot to each node. 4. Count Time (CT): it is the maximum time period between two successive reports sent by a node. The node senses the environment continuously, and only those nodes which sense a data value at or beyond the hard threshold transmit. Once a node senses a value beyond HT, it transmits data only when the value of that attribute changes by an amount equal to or greater than the ST. If a node does not send data for a time period equal to the count time, it is forced to sense and retransmit the data. A TDMA schedule is used and each node in the cluster is assigned a transmission slot. Hence, APTEEN uses a modified TDMA schedule to implement the hybrid network. The main features of the APTEEN scheme include the following. It combines both proactive and reactive policies. It offers a lot of flexibility by allowing the user to set the count-time interval (CT), and the threshold values for the energy consumption can be controlled by changing the count time as well as the threshold values. The main drawback of the scheme is the additional complexity required to implement the threshold functions and the count time. Simulation of TEEN and APTEEN has shown that these two protocols outperform LEACH. The experiments have demonstrated that APTEENs performance is somewhere between LEACH and TEEN in terms of energy dissipation and network lifetime. TEEN gives the best performance since it decreases the number of transmissions. The main drawbacks of the two approaches are the overhead and complexity associated with

forming clusters at multiple levels, the method of implementing threshold-based functions, and how to deal with attribute-based naming of queries. 1.2.4 Self-Organizing Protocol (SOP):- Self-organizing protocol (SOP) is heterogeneity based routing protocol. In this approach, some sensors sense the environment and forward the data to a designated set of nodes that act as routers. Router nodes are stationary and form a backbone for communication. Collected data are forwarded through the routers tithe more powerful BS nodes. Sensing nodes can be identified through the address of the router node they are connected to. The routing architecture is hierarchical where groups of nodes are formed and merged when needed. Local Markov Loops (LML) algorithm, which performs a random walk on spanning trees of a graph, is used to support fault tolerance and as a medium for broadcasting. Here sensor nodes can be addressed individually, and hence it is suitable for applications where communication to a particular node is required. The algorithm for self-organizing the router nodes and creating the routing tables consists of four phases: Discovery Phase: The nodes in the neighborhood of each sensor are discovered. Organization phase: Groups are formed and merged by forming a hierarchy. Each node is allocated an address based on its position in the hierarchy. Routing tables of size O(log N) are created for each node. Broadcast trees that span all the nodes are constructed. Maintenance phase: Updating of routing tables and energy levels of nodes is made in this phase. Each node informs the neighbors about its routing table and energy level. LML are used to maintain broadcast trees. Self-reorganization phase: In case of partition or node failures, group reorganizations are performed. The proposed algorithm utilizes the router nodes to keep all the sensors connected by forming a dominating set. The major advantage of using the algorithm is the small cost of maintaining routing tables and keeping routing balanced. The disadvantage is in the organization phase of algorithm, which is not on-demand. Furthermore, this algorithm incurs a small cost for maintaining routing tables and maintaining a balanced routing hierarchy. Therefore, it may cause extra overhead. 1.3 Location/Geographic Based Routing: - In location-based protocols, sensor nodes are addressed by means of their locations. Location information for sensor nodes is required for sensor networks by most of the routing protocols to calculate the distance between two particular nodes so that energy consumption can be estimated. In this section, we present a sample of location-aware routing protocols proposed for WSNs.

1.3.1 Geographic and Energy-Aware Routing (GEAR): GEAR uses energy aware and geographically informed neighbor selection heuristics to route a packet towards the target region. The idea is to restrict the number of interests in Directed Diffusion by only considering a certain region rather than sending the interests to the whole network.

GEAR compliments Directed Diffusion in this way and thus conserves more energy. In GEAR, each node keeps an estimated cost and a learning cost of reaching the destination through its neighbors. The estimated cost is a combination of residual energy and distance to destination. The learned cost is a refinement of the estimated cost that accounts for routing around holes in the network. A hole occurs when a node does not have any closer neighbor to the target region than itself. If there are no holes, the estimated cost is equal to the learned cost. The learned cost is propagated one hop back every time a packet reaches the destination so that route setup for next packet will be adjusted. There are two phases in the algorithm: 1. Forwarding packets towards the target region: Upon receiving a packet, a node checks its neighbors to see if there is one neighbor, which is closer to the target region than itself. If there is more than one, the nearest neighbor to the target region is selected as the next hop. If they are all further than the node itself, this means there is a hole. In this case, one of the neighbors is picked to forward the packet based on the learning cost function. This choice can then be updated according to the convergence of the learned cost during the delivery of packets. 2. Forwarding the packets within the region: If the packet has reached the region, it can be diffused in that region by either recursive geographic forwarding or restricted flooding. Restricted flooding is good when the sensors are not densely deployed. In highdensity networks, recursive geographic flooding is more energy efficient than restricted flooding. In that case, the region is divided into four sub regions and four copies of the packet are created. This splitting and forwarding process continues until the regions with only one node are left. An example is depicted in figure above. 1.3.2 Geographic Adaptive Fidelity (GAF):- GAF is an energy-aware routing protocol primarily proposed for MANETs, but can also be used for WSNs because it favors energy conservation. The design of GAF is motivated based on an energy model that considers energy consumption due to the reception and transmission of packets as well as idle (or listening) time when the radio of a sensor is on to detect the presence of incoming packets. GAF is based on mechanism of turning off unnecessary sensors while keeping a constant level of routing fidelity (or uninterrupted connectivity between communicating sensors). In GAF, sensor field is divided into grid squares and every sensor uses its location information, which can be provided by GPS or other location systems, to associate itself with a particular grid in which it resides. This kind of association is exploited by GAF to identify the sensors that are equivalent from the

perspective of packet forwarding. As shown in below, the state transition diagram of GAF has three states, namely, discovery, active, and sleeping. When a sensor enters the sleeping state, it turns off its radio for energy savings. In the discovery state, a sensor exchanges discovery messages to learn about other sensors in the same grid. Even in the active state, a sensor periodically broadcasts its discovery message to inform equivalent sensors about its state. The time spent in each of these states can be tuned by the application depending on several factors, such as its needs and sensor mobility. GAF aims to maximize the network lifetime by reaching a state where each grid has only one active sensor based on sensor ranking rules. The ranking of sensors is based on their residual energy levels. Thus, a sensor with a higher rank will be able to handle routing within their corresponding grids. For example, a sensor in the active state has a higher rank than a sensor in the discovery state. A sensor with longer expected lifetime has a higher rank. 1.3.3 MECN: - Minimum Energy Communication Network (MECN) is a location-based protocol for achieving minimum energy for randomly deployed ad hoc networks, which attempts to set up and maintain a minimum energy network with mobile sensors. It is self-reconfiguring protocol that maintains network connectivity in spite of sensor mobility. It computes an optimal spanning tree rooted at the sink, called minimum power topology, which contains only the minimum power paths from ach sensor to the sink. It is based on the positions of sensors on the plane and consists of two main phases, namely, enclosure graph construction and cost distribution. For a stationary network, in the first phase (enclosure graph construction), MECN constructs a sparse graph, called an enclosure graph, based on the immediate locality of the sensors. An enclosure graph is a directed graph that includes all the sensors as its vertex set and whose edge set is the union of all edges between the sensors and the neighbors located in their enclosure regions. In other words, a sensor will not consider the sensors located in its relay regions as potential candidate forwarders of its sensed data to the sink. In the second phase (cost distribution), non-optimal links of the enclosure graph are simply eliminated and the resulting graph is a minimum power topology. This graph has a directed path from each sensor to the sink and consumes the least total power among all graphs having directed paths from each sensor to the sink. Each sensor broadcasts its cost to its neighbors, where the cost of a node is the minimum power required for this sensor to establish a directed path to the sink. While MECN is a self-reconfiguring protocol, and hence is fault tolerant (in the case of mobile networks), it suffers from a severe battery depletion problem when applied to static networks. MECN does not take into consideration the available energy at each sensor, and hence the optimal cost links are static. In other words, a sensor will always

use the same neighbor to transmit or forward sensed data to the sink. For this reason, this neighbor would die very quickly and the network thus becomes disconnected. To address this problem, the enclosure graph and thus the minimum power topology should be dynamic based on the residual energy of the sensors. 1.3.4 SMECN: - Small Minimum-Energy Communication Network (SMECN) is a routing protocol proposed to improve MECN, in which a minimal graph is characterized with regard to the minimum energy property. This property implies that for any pair of sensors in a graph associated with a network, there is a minimum energy-efficient path between them; that is, a path that has the smallest cost in terms of energy consumption over all possible paths between this pair of sensors. Their characterization of a graph with respect to the minimum energy property is intuitive. In SMECN protocol, every sensor discovers its immediate neighbors by broadcasting a neighbor discovery message using some initial power that is updated incrementally. Specifically, the immediate neighbors of a given sensor are computed analytically. Then, a sensor starts broadcasting a neighbor discovery message with some initial power p and checks whether the theoretical set of immediate neighbors is a subset of the set of sensors that replied to that neighbor discovery message. If this is the case, the sensor will use the corresponding power p to communicate with its immediate neighbors. Otherwise, it increments p and rebroadcasts its neighbor discovery message. 2. Protocol Based Routing: - In this section, we review routing protocols that different routing functionality. It should be noted that some of these protocols may fall below one or more of the above routing categories. 2.1.1. Multi-Path Based Routing Protocol: - Considering data transmission between source sensors and the sink, there are two routing paradigms: single-path routing and multipath routing. In single-path routing, each source sensor sends its data to the sink via the shortest path. In multipath routing, each source sensor finds the first k shortest paths to the sink and divides its load evenly among these paths. In this section, we review a sample of multipath routing protocols for WSNs. Example: Directed Diffusion. 2.1.1.1. Disjoint Paths: Sensor-disjoint multipath routing is a multipath protocol that helps find a small number of alternate paths that have no sensor in common with each other and with the primary path. In sensor-disjoint path routing, the primary path is best available whereas the alternate paths are less desirable as they have longer latency. The disjoint makes those alternate paths independent of the primary path. Thus, if a failure occurs on the primary path, it remains local and does not affect any of those alternate paths. The sink can determine which of its neighbors can provide it with the highest quality data characterized by the lowest loss or lowest delay after the network has been flooded with some low-rate samples. Although disjoint paths are more resilient to sensor failures, they can be potentially longer than the primary path and thus less energy efficient.

2.1.1.2. Braided Paths: Braided multipath is a partially disjoint path from primary one after relaxing the disjointedness constraint. To construct the braided multipath, first primary path is computed. Then, for each node (or sensor) on the primary path, the best path from a source sensor to the sink that does not include that node is computed. Those best alternate paths are not necessarily disjoint from the primary path and are called idealized braided multipath. Moreover, the links of each of the alternate paths lie either on or geographically close to the primary path. Therefore, the energy consumption on the primary and alternate paths seems to be comparable as opposed to the scenario of mutually ternate and primary paths. The braided multipath can also be constructed in a localized manner in which case the sink sends out a primarypath reinforcement to its first preferred neighbor and alternate-path reinforcement to its second preferred neighbor. 2.1.1.3. N-to-1 Multipath Discovery: N-to-1 multipath discovery is based on the simple flooding originated from the sink and is composed of two phases, namely, branch aware flooding (or phase 1) and multipath extension of flooding (or phase 2). Both phases use the same routing messages whose format is given by {mtype, mid, nid, bid, cst, path}, where mtype refers to the type of a message. This multipath discovery protocol generates multiple node-disjoint paths for every sensor. In multihop routing, an active per-hop packet salvaging strategy can be adopted to handle sensor failures and enhance network reliability.

2.1.2. Negotiation Based Routing: - In order to eliminate redundant data transmissions, these use high level data descriptors through negotiation. Based on the resources that are available to them, communication decisions are taken. The motivation is that the use of flooding to disseminate data will produce implosion and overlap between the sent data; hence nodes will receive duplicate copies of the same data. This consumes more energy and more processing by sending the same data to different sensor nodes. So, the main idea of negotiation based routing in WSNs is to suppress duplicate information and prevent redundant data from being sent to the next sensor node or the base-station by conducting a series of negotiation messages before the real data transmission begins. Example:- SPIN 2.1.3. Query Based Routing: - The destination nodes propagate a query for data (sensing task) from a node through the network and a node having this data sends back the data to the node that matches the query to the query that initiates. Usually these queries are described in natural language, or in high-level query languages. Example: - Rumor Routing. 2.1.4. QoS Based Routing: - In order to satisfy certain QoS (Quality of Service) metrics, e.g., delay, energy, bandwidth, etc. when delivering data to the Base Station, the network has to balance between energy consumption and data quality.

2.1.4.1. SPEED: - SPEED is a QoS routing protocol for sensor networks that provides soft real-time end-to-end guarantees. The protocol requires each node to maintain information about its neighbors and uses geographic forwarding to find the paths. In addition, SPEED strive to ensure a certain speed for each packet in the network so that each application can estimate the end-to-end delay for the packets by dividing the distance to the sink by the speed of the packet before making the admission decision. Moreover, SPEED can provide congestion avoidance when the network is congested. The routing module in SPEED is called Stateless Geographic Non-Deterministic forwarding (SNFG) and works with four other modules at the network layer. The beacon exchange mechanism collects information about the nodes and their location. Delay estimation at each node is basically made by calculating the elapsed time when an ACK is received from a neighbor as a response to a transmitted data packet. By looking at the delay values, SNGF selects the node, which meets the speed requirement. If it fails, the relay ratio of the node is checked, which is calculated by looking at the miss ratios of the neighbors of a node (the nodes which could not provide the desired speed) and is fed to the SNGF module. When compared to Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) and Ad-hoc on-demand vector routing (AODV), SPEED performs better in terms of end-to-end delay and miss ratio. Moreover, the total transmission energy is less due to the simplicity of the routing algorithm, i.e. control packet overhead is less, and to the even traffic distribution. Such load balancing is achieved through the SNGF mechanism of dispersing packets into a large relay area. SPEED does not consider any further energy metric in its routing protocol. Therefore, for more realistic understanding of SPEEDs energy consumption, there is a need for comparing it to a routing protocol, which is energy-aware. 2.1.4.2. Sequential Assignment Routing (SAR): SAR is one of the first routing protocols for WSNs that introduces the notion of QoS in the routing decisions. It is a table-driven multi-path approach striving to achieve energy efficiency and fault tolerance. Routing decision in SAR is dependent on three factors: energy resources, QoS on each path, and the priority level of each packet. The SAR protocol creates 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. By using created trees, multiple paths from sink to sensors are formed. One of these paths is selected according to the energy resources and QoS on the path. Failure recovery is done by enforcing routing table consistency between upstream and downstream nodes on each path. Any local failure causes an automatic path restoration procedure locally. The objective of SAR algorithm is to minimize the average weighted QoS metric throughout the lifetime of the network. If topology changes due to node failures, a path re-computation is needed. As a preventive measure, a periodic re-computation of paths is triggered by the base-station to account for any changes in the topology. A handshake procedure based on a local path restoration scheme between neighboring nodes is used to recover from a failure. Failure recovery is done by enforcing routing

table consistency between upstream and downstream nodes on each path. Simulation results showed that SAR offers less power consumption than the minimum-energy metric algorithm, which focuses only the energy consumption of each packet without considering its priority. Although, this ensures faulttolerance and easy recovery, the protocol suffers from the overhead of maintaining the tables and states at each sensor node especially when the number of nodes is huge. 2.1.4.3. Energy-Aware QoS Routing Protocol: In this QoS aware protocol for sensor networks, real-time traffic is generated by imaging sensors. The proposed protocol extends the routing approach in and finds a least cost and energy efficient path that meets certain end-to-end delay during the connection. The link cost used is a function that captures the nodes energy reserve, transmission energy, error rate and other communication parameters. In order to support both best effort and real-time traffic at the same time, a class-based queuing model is employed. The queuing model allows service sharing for real-time and non-real-time traffic. The protocol finds a list of least cost paths by using an extended version of Dijkstras algorithm and picks a path from that list which meets the end-to-end delay requirement. Simulation results show that the proposed protocol consistently performs well with respect to QoS and energy metrics, however, it does not provide flexible adjusting of bandwidth sharing for different links. 2.1.5. Coherent and non-coherent processing: Data processing is a major component in the operation of wireless sensor networks. Hence, routing techniques employ different data processing techniques. There are two ways of data processing based routing. 2.1.5.1. Non-coherent data processing: In this, nodes will locally process the raw data before being sent to other nodes for further processing. The nodes that perform further processing are called the aggregators. 2.1.5.2. Coherent data processing: In coherent routing, the data is forwarded to aggregators after minimum processing. The minimum processing typically includes tasks like time stamping, duplicate suppression, etc. When all nodes are sources and send their data to the central aggregator node, a large amount of energy will be consumed and hence this process has a high cost. One way to lower the energy cost is to limit the number of sources that can send data to the central aggregator node. Conclusion and Future Research One of the main challenges in the design of routing protocols for WSNs is energy efficiency due to the scarce energy resources of sensors. The ultimate objective behind the routing protocol design is to keep the sensors operating for as long as possible, thus extending the network lifetime. The energy consumption of the sensors is dominated by data transmission and reception. Therefore, routing protocols designed for WSNs should be as energy efficient as possible to prolong the lifetime of individual sensors, and hence the network lifetime.

In this paper, we have surveyed a sample of routing protocols by taking into account several classification criteria, including location information, network layering and in-network processing, data centricity, path redundancy, network dynamics, QoS requirements, and network heterogeneity. For each of these categories, we have discussed a few example protocols. Two important related research directions should receive attention from the researcher namely the design of routing protocols for duty-cycled WSNs, and three-dimensional (3D) sensor fields when designing such protocols. Although most of research work on WSNs, in particular, on routing, considered two-dimensional (2D) settings, where sensors are deployed on a planar field, there are some situations where the 2D assumption is not reasonable and the use of a 3D design becomes a necessity. In fact, 3D settings reflect more accurate network design for real-world applications. For example, a network deployed on the trees of different heights in a forest, in a building with multiple floors, or underwater, requires design in 3D rather than 2D space. Although some efforts have been devoted to the design of routing and data dissemination protocols for 3D sensing applications, we believe that these first-step attempts are in their infancy, and more powerful and efficient protocols are required to satisfactorily address all problems that may occur.

Thank You Have a Nice Day