A Study on Classification of Energy Efficient Routing Protocols in Wireless Sensor Networks

The recent advances in integrated circuit technology, microelectro mechanical system technology, Adhoc network routing protocol, distributed signal processing and embedded systems have enabled the development of low cost, low power, network enabled and multifunctional wireless sensor network environment. The most important thing of a routing protocol, in order to be efficient for WSN, is the energy consumption and the extension of networks life time. Wireless sensor networks are initially designed for monitoring and reporting events, nowadays it is used for variety of applications. As every application has distinct requirement single Routing protocol is inefficient. We classify energy efficient routing protocols into three main schemes as data-centric, hierarchical and location based routing. This comparison reveals the important design issues that need to be taken into consideration while designing and evaluating network protocol.