Heirarchical clustering in heterogeneous wireless sensor networks: A survey

Wireless Sensor Network is a network of small battery powered sensing devices (known as sensing nodes), capable of sensing the physical parameters like temperature, humidity, pressure, motion, etc. from its environment of deployment and report it to a central node called base station. These nodes collaborate with each other to fulfill their task. As the energy source is constrained in WSNs, it should be used properly. Clustering is one of the techniques which are being used effectively to minimize energy dissipation in WSNs. Clustering protocols lead to improvement in the consumption of energy, reduced cost of communication in the network and improved efficiency. In this paper, we present a fine grained survey on LEACH based hierarchical clustering protocols, especially in a heterogeneous network where the energy of the nodes is different and at the end we present comparison in tabular form, on the basis of base station location, contribution, advantages, disadvantages and improvement achieved with the compared protocols.