title: A survey on clustering routing protocols in wireless sensor networks.
abstract: The past few years have witnessed increased interest in the potential use of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) in a wide range of applications and it has become a hot research area. Based on network structure, routing protocols in WSNs can be divided into two categories: flat routing and hierarchical or clustering routing. Owing to a variety of advantages, clustering is becoming an active branch of routing technology in WSNs. In this paper, we present a comprehensive and fine grained survey on clustering routing protocols proposed in the literature for WSNs. We outline the advantages and objectives of clustering for WSNs, and develop a novel taxonomy of WSN clustering routing methods based on complete and detailed clustering attributes. In particular, we systematically analyze a few prominent WSN clustering routing protocols and compare these different approaches according to our taxonomy and several significant metrics. Finally, we summarize and conclude the paper with some future directions.
authors.affiliation: School of Electronic and Information Engineering, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou 510641, China. liuxuxun@scut.edu.cn
authors.forename: Xuxun
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Liu
mesh_terms: D016000:Cluster Analysis; D003195:Computer Communication Networks; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D059015:Wireless Technology
keywords: cluster construction; clustering routing; data transmission; taxonomy; wireless sensor networks