Performance and Analysis of Cluster Based Protocols for Energy Efficient Wireless Sensor Networks

The wireless sensor networks (WSN) comprise of mostly battery powered tiny sensor nodes. In most of the applications it is not possible to replace the batteries or recharge them. As such the batteries are limited source of energy result in energy constrained networks. They have wide variety of applications which include environmental monitoring, structural health monitoring, military surveillance, medical applications, disaster mitigation etc. Sensor nodes have various energy constraints, computational constraints and communicational constraints. Numerous protocols have been put forward for improving the energy efficiency to increase the overall network lifetime. This paper gives an analysis of various energy efficient cluster based protocols. The Dummy node based protocol offers improved life cycle of the cluster based sensor network.