On hierarchical routing in wireless sensor networks
Konrad Iwanicki, Maarten R. van Steen · 2009
Hierarchical routing (HR) has been touted as one of the major point-to-point routing techniques for large wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Yet, in contrast to numerous theoretical analyzes and high-level simulations, little work has been done to evaluate this technique in realistic WSN settings and to compare various proposed protocols. We fill this gap in this paper. Based on the analysis of a few tens of proposed HR infrastructures, we develop a framework that captures the common characteristics of the infrastructures and at the same time identifies various design points where the infrastructures differ. We then evaluate the implementation of the framework on a 60-node testbed and in TOSSIM. Our results demonstrate how HR performs in practice, how such performance diverges from high-level simulation results, and how it is affected by different design decisions in different infrastructures. Ultimately, our goal is to identify under which circumstances HR can be practical in WSNs.