Performance Evaluation of Wireless Sensor Networks Using Energy-Aware Routing Protocols

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are constrained by limited battery capacity, making routing strategy a decisive factor in network lifetime. This paper presents a simulation-oriented methodology for evaluating energy-aware routing protocols under a common radio-energy model. Three representative hierarchical protocols—Low-Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy (LEACH), Hybrid Energy-Efficient Distributed clustering (HEED), and Distributed Energy-Efficient Clustering (DEEC)—are compared using identical node placement, packet size, sink position, and initial energy conditions. The evaluation emphasizes first-node-death (FND), half-node-death (HND), alive-node count, residual energy, and stability period. A heterogeneous network model is used so that energy-aware cluster-head selection can be studied under unequal node resources. The methodology-level simulation shows that residual-energy-aware selection improves the stability period over purely randomized cluster-head rotation. In the benchmark used here, HEED improves FND by about 18.4% over LEACH, while DEEC improves FND by about 30.6% and HND by about 14.9%. The proposed procedure is intended as a reproducible framework for comparing routing behavior rather than as a direct reproduction of any single published implementation.