A Study of Energy Efficient Routing Protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks consist of miniaturized battery powered sensor nodes with constrained computational capability. Packet forwarding in sensor networks is usually performed through multi-hop data transmission due to the limitation of the communication range and an optimal choice of the routing path has been significantly increased the performance of the sensor networks. The application of topology control methods in wireless sensor networks will have a profound impact on energy efficiency and the limited and constrained resources have driven research towards primarily reducing energy consumption, energy minimization, memory requirements and complexity of routing functionalities. In this paper the routing protocols have been classified into two different categories based on the underlying network structure; as: flat and location based techniques. For all of these protocol families, we have provided a didactic presentation and a detailed description with emphasis on the advantages and disadvantages of those latest state-of-the-art protocols. Depending on the outcomes of the literature survey, a number of open research issues have been identified for achieving energy efficiency in the development of routing protocols for wireless sensor networks.