A comprehensive survey of secure and energy efficient routing protocols and data collection approaches in wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) consist of numerous, tiny, multifunctional sensor nodes for collection of data and information from various target areas or sensing fields. WSNs can be used for various applications such as health-care monitoring, military investigations, space exploration, environment monitoring, disaster management, etc. these are also useful for applications where traditional wireless and wired networks cannot be deployed. Data transmission in WSNs is not an easy task due to resource constrained nodes, limited battery time, low transmission power, etc. energy is the crucial parameter in WSNs for sensing and transmitting the sensed data to the sink. WSNs are deployed in hostile and remote locations making them vulnerable to various types of security attacks. Thus design of WSNs routing protocols must consider various routing challenges and design issues. The survey describes various data collection approaches and efficient routing protocols to reduce the networks energy consumption. The paper presents various routing challenges as well as the limitations of WSNs. It also provides a detailed explanation of four basic types of routing protocols namely location-based, info-centric, hierarchical and multi-path based routing. Some open research issues are also listed along with the conclusion.