A Survey of Network Protocols for Performance Enhancement in Wireless Sensor Networks

With the help of present state-of-the-art microelectronic and electrical technologies, smart wireless sensor networks (WSNs) can be realized that are capable of sensing and monitoring diverse type of environmental parameters like air temperature, humidity, pollution, gas level, etc. Measured data provides a feedback that is used to operate different support systems like air conditioners and ventilators for environmental control. High energy efficiency along with high network throughput rates and low latency are critical design issues for a wireless sensor network. Different types of network protocols like node geographic location-based, multihop, data aggregation, and hierarchical clustering protocols have been proposed for performance enhancement of WSNs. This paper presents a detailed review of different routing protocols for WSN along with their merits and demerits. Node geographic location-based routing like Geographic Distance Routing (GEDIR) and hierarchical clustering (HC)-based routing protocol such as Distributed Energy-Efficient Clustering (DEEC) provides and increased network lifetime and network throughput performance along with reduced network latency performance of a WSN.