Performance analysis of clustering protocols in WSN

Large-scale deployments of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) and the need for efficient optimization of network resources to prolong the life time of such networks opened the door for researchers to find efficient clustering techniques. Clustering has proven to be an effective approach for organizing a large scale network into connected groups which increases the life time and the reliability. In this paper, we highlight the challenges in clustering a large scale WSN, discuss some of clustering protocols, and classify them based on the clusters technique formation and the way that data is aggregated to the base station. We further consider the case of border monitoring and simulate these protocols and compare their performance results using different scenarios.