A study on distributed diffusion and its variants

Energy awareness is an essential design issue in wireless sensor networks (WSN). The routing techniques of WSN are classified into three main categories data-centric, hierarchical and location-based. Data-centric technologies perform in-network aggregation of data to yield energy-efficient dissemination; sensor protocols for information via negotiation (SPIN) and directed diffusion (DD) are basic data-centric routing protocols. This paper presents a survey on data-centric routing and specifically focuses on the directed diffusion and its variants (dissemination and aggregation variants) and the protocols that follow the similar concept like directed diffusion.