## 4 Comparative Analysis of Proposed Solution with EADUC and TLPER
In EAR4 MCDA, the first layer, which covers about a 50 m-70 m area, does not have clusters--that's why it is termed a flat layer. In the remaining area, the cluster size is almost the same. In the case of TLPER, the proximity of nodes to the CH that is based on the Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) is what defines the cluster size, while in case of EADUC, cluster size is directly related to proximity to the BS. The lesser the distance of a cluster to the BS, the smaller is its size and _vice versa_. Based on the above discussion, the higher number of clusters in EADUC compared to TLPER and EAR4 MCDA is logical. This comparison is depicted in Figure 10.  
In extension to the previous discussion, it can be construed that a bigger number of clusters may mean more end to end hops, but this again depends upon the inter- and intra-cluster routing strategies. Aggregated data at the CH is sent to any next hop neighbor node which is closest to the BS. While in TPLER, inter- and in some cases intra-cluster communication is multi-hop, so there are more hops in any related communication path in the case of EADUC and EAR4 MCDA. Figure 11 illustrates these points. Figure 9: Average energy consumption for transmitting one packet from end to end. Coming back to Figure 9 and correlating its result with Figures 10 and 11, we can intuit that forwarding node selection has its vital role in energy conservation and thus in energy-aware routing. Throughput is another important scale of measuring the efficiency of routing protocol. A higher production packet number at the source node does not mean an increased throughput. Moving one step back to this point, more clusters may mean more packet production numbers. Let there be a scenario of 100 nodes. If there are five clusters and on the average each cluster may comprise of 20 nodes, the estimated waiting time for a node to communicate its data to a cluster head is equal to 19 or 20 time slots under the TDMA MAC protocol. If the data rate is four packets per second then at least 20/4 = 5 s are required to complete one cycle. During this time of 5 s, 20 packets are expected to be produced by keeping all other things constant. Since clusters' work in parallel and not in series, the number of packets that are produced in five clusters is (5 \(\times\) 20)=100 packets. In another comparative scenario of 10 clusters with 10 nodes in each cluster with the same data rate and same conditions as in previous scenario, 2.5 s are needed to complete one cycle with the production of 10 packets and in 5 s 20 packets are formed in the cluster, so a maximum of 200 packets (20 \(\times\) 10) are produced in an ideal case in this scenario. Based on these two scenarios, the higher number of packets produced in EADUC compared to TLPER and EAR4 MCDA is logical (Figure 12). Figure 11: Average no. of hops from end to end. Figure 10: No. of designed clusters. However, more packet production does not mean better throughput. Figure 13 plots the results of throughput in the first 300 s. The graph represents the superiority of EAR4 MCDA over TLPER and EADUC with a performance efficiency of 33% and 30%, respectively. The very apparent reason for this outperformance lies more in FN selection in a complex way that gives rise to longer queues in nodes' buffers and hence more node delay leading to increased end to end delay. This may further result in more packet losses and thus the decreased throughput (Figure 13). This reflects overall poor network performance with non-energy aware routing. Figure 14 shows the energy consumption for the total throughput for the first 300 s.  
We have also evaluated the performance of the competing algorithms on energy consumption for the CH rotation parameter that is depicted in Figure 15. EADUC does a completely new design of clusters in each round that increases its energy consumption value during the CH rotation process while TLPER transfers the CH role to the already selected assistant CH node. Almost same procedure is followed in EAR4 MCDA.