A Study of Routing Protocols in Wireless Sensor Networks

Recent advances in wireless sensor networks have led to many new routing protocols specifically designed for sensor networks where energy awareness is an essential consideration. At first, this paper gives a short overview of recent routing protocols for sensor networks and presents a classification for the various approaches. The four main categories explored in this paper are data-centric, hierarchical, location-based, and network flow and QoS-aware. Then, the existing hardware research platforms are explored as well as the software platforms such as simulation and development tools. Next, our study plan including platform, object and method is presented. In the end, the paper concludes with some open research issues