Review on Routing Techniques in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

： Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) consist of small nodes with sensing, computation and wireless communications capabilities. These nodes are limited with respect to energy supply restricted computational capacity and communication bandwidth & are primarily designed for monitoring and reporting events. Routing protocols for wireless sensor networks are responsible for maintaining the routes in the network and have to ensure reliable multi-hop communication under these conditions so many routing power management and data dissemination protocols have been specially designed for WSNs where energy awareness is an essential design issue. The focus however has been given to the routing protocols which might differ depending on the application and network architecture because each routing protocol has its merits and shortcomings, also sensor nodes are application dependent so a single routing protocol cannot be efficient for sensor networks across all applications. The lifetime will end when the working routing protocol can no longer support the whole wireless sensor network. To prolong the lifetime of the sensor nodes designing of efficient routing protocols is critical. In this paper, we present a survey of the state-of-the-art routing techniques in WSNs. We first outline the design challenges for routing protocols in WSNs followed by a comprehensive survey of different routing techniques. The paper concludes with possible future research areas.