Analysis of Scalability for Hierarchical Routing Protocols in Wireless Sensor Networks

The effectiveness of wireless sensor networks depend on the essential routing protocol. Due to the change in the application requirement, it may vary the characteristics of a routing protocol. As scalability (i.e., varying the number of nodes by considering another parameter constant) is an important issue which occurs due to an increase in the number of nodes. Thus, any routing protocol should work effectively, when scalability factor is considered. In this paper, we analyze the scalability issues of various hierarchical based routing based protocol. Here we have categorised scalability in two classes – varying the number of nodes and varying the size of terrain. We have performed analytical simulation in MATLAB which showed the limitation and capability of the existing WSN routing protocols (i.e. LEACH, PEGASIS, TBC, GSTEB,CAMP, HEEMP) against scalability. It is found that except PEGASIS all other aforementioned routing protocols are scalable.