Survey on Routing Protocols in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks are known as the network of thousands of wireless sensor nodes with the communicating abilities ̧ sensing the various physical and environmental conditions, computing and data processing capabilities. These networks are widely used in military and civilian fields. The sensor nodes have restricted energy resources, and the transmission range, communication bandwidth and storage capacity is also limited. The important deign issue is to route the data correctly so as to increase the life of the nodes. In this paper we present the various routing protocols, as they differ for various applications and network architecture. There are three main categories of the protocols: hierarchical, location based and data centric. Further these protocols can be categorized as network flow, negotiation based, QoS based, query based. Choosing the correct and energy efficient routing protocol determines and maintains a reliable multi-hop communication. This paper includes various routing protocols and compares their strengths and limitation