Investigating and Evaluating Energy-efficient Routing Protocols in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks are comprised of a group of nodes, which are randomly distributed in an environment. Since the energy consumptions of nodes are limited in these networks, data should be collected and sent optimally and in an energy-efficient way. The available routing protocols are used to send data in this way. The main responsibility of these protocols is to reduce energy consumption and increase network lifetime in routing. Energy-efficient routing protocols are investigated for such networks in this paper. These protocols are divided into three groups, based on data, network structure and reliability. Regarding data-centric protocols, on-demand and negotiation-based protocols are discussed. Based on the network structure, hierarchical and location-based protocols are introduced. In the reliability-based group, the quality of service and multipath routing protocols are presented. In addition to investigating the protocols of each group and challenges in energy-efficient routing, the obtained parameters are compared in order to introduce the best protocol in each group.