A survey on QoS mechanisms in WSN for computational intelligence based routing protocols

Abstract

With the rapid development in ubiquitous smart sensors, wireless sensor networks have started to evolve into numerous applications including healthcare, medical, agriculture, transportation, industry, internet of things, and smart cities. However, satisfying Quality of Service (QoS) requirements of the diverse application domains remains a challenging issue due to heterogeneous traffic flows, dynamic network conditions, and resource-constrained nature of sensor nodes. In this regard, application-specific QoS provisioning techniques have received considerable research attention at the network layer. This paper presents a systematic review on the QoS mechanisms that have been employed by routing protocols and also highlights the performance issues of each mechanism. Afterwards, the survey presents a comparative analysis of computational intelligence based QoS-aware routing protocols with their strengths and limitations. Finally, this survey discusses various potential directions for future research in the field of QoS provisioning at network layer.