Performance Analysis of Routing Metrics for Wireless Sensor Networks

A wireless sensor network is a heterogeneous network consisting of a large number of tiny low-cost nodes and one or more base stations. Each sensor node comprises sensing, processing, transmission, mobilize, position finding system, and power units. These networks can use in various applications like military, health and commercial. Routing in wireless sensor networks has been an active area of research for many years. Sensor nodes have a limited transmission range, processing, storage capabilities and energy resources are also limited. In wireless sensor networks data is forwarded using multi-hop mechanism. Therefore, a variety of routing metrics has been proposed by various authors in wireless sensor networks for providing routing algorithms with high flexibility in the selection of best path and offering a compromise between throughput, end-to-end delay, and energy consumption. In this paper, we present a detailed survey about existing routing metrics in wireless sensor networks. The routing metrics are also compared based on their essential characteristics and tabulated.