The Impact of Sensor Node Distribution on Routing Protocols Performance: A Comparitive Study

The contemporary routing algorithms were built and tested under the assumption of uniformly distributed sensor nodes. However, this assumption is not always true. In some industrial applications and due to the scope of the ongoing monitoring process, sensors are installed and condensed in some area, while they are sparse in other areas. In this work, we investigate the impact of sensor node deployment distributions on the performance of different flavors of LEACH routing algorithm. Further, we study the impact of base station location, and different data loads. A comparison between LEACH and LEACH-C is conducted. The results show that different sensor distributions leads to significant differences in network performance. Furthermore, it shows that LEACH-C out performs LEACH almost in all distributions variations and base station locations.