Survey on Variants of Distributed Energy efficient Clustering Protocols in heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Network

Wireless sensor networks are composed of low cost and extremely power constrained sensor nodes which are scattered over a region forming self organized networks, making energy consumption a crucial design issue. Thus, finite network lifetime is widely regarded as a fundamental performance bottleneck. These networks are used for various applications such as field monitoring, home automation, medical data collection or surveillance. Research has shown that clustering sensor nodes is an efficient method to manage energy consumption for prolonging the network lifetime. Presence of heterogeneity enhances the lifetime and reliability in network. In this paper, we present the distributed and energy efficient clustering protocols which follow the thoughts of Distributed Energy Efficient Clustering (DEEC) protocol. Objective of our work is to analyze that how these extended routing protocols work in order to optimize network lifetime and how routing protocols are improved. We emphasizes on issues experienced by various protocols and how these issues are tackled by other enhanced protocols. This provides a survey of work done on distributed energy efficient protocols.