Comparative Study of SWST (Simple Weighted Spanning Tree) and EAST (Energy Aware Spanning Tree)

Wireless Sensors Networks (WSNs) are utilized in many diverse applications ranging from security, environmental monitoring, landslide detection, patient monitoring, reconnaissance operations, structural health monitoring and smart buildings. Since in many applications the WSN nodes are randomly deployed, WSNs need to be able to arrange and self-organize. Nodes in WSNs generally possess low or limited power resources such as batteries. Energy utilization thus is an important design consideration for WSN deployment. There have been many energy aware protocols proposed in the literature to increase the longevity of the network. Recently, two novel Connected Dominating Set (CDS) based topology construction (TC) protocols- SWST (Simple Weighted Spanning Tree) and EAST (Energy Aware Spanning Tree), have been proposed which aim to balance the load among the nodes of the network and thus to reduce the probability of dying for a particular node. The SWST and EAST protocols aim to reduce the number of broken links that may have been caused by a single node becoming dead or comatose in the communication backbone of the network. In this paper, a comparative study of the SWST and EAST algorithms is conducted to evaluate the performance of the two algorithms. From the MATLAB simulations it was observed that the EAST protocol generally performs better than the SWST algorithms in delivering messages to the sink node.