Existing Routing Protocols for Wireless Sensor Network - A study.

Abstract

Wide usage of wireless sensor network (WSN) is the reason for development of many routing protocols. Recent advances in WSN observe the increased interest in the potential use in applications like Military, Environmental, Health, Vehicular, Mechanical stress levels on attached objects, disaster management etc. Wireless sensor networks are callously restricted by storage capacity, energy and computing power. So it is essential to design an energy efficient aware protocol in order to augment the network lifetime. WSN also has the influencing features to perform remote communication, it is also shrouded with various loopholes in its precise operation, where majority of the communication issues are raised from deployment of existing standards of routing protocols and algorithm. Sensors are expected to be remotely deployed in unnoticed environments. Routing as one key technologies of wireless sensor network has now become very important research work because the applications of WSN is everywhere, it is impractical that there is a routing protocol suitable for all applications. In this paper, a review on routing protocol in WSNs is carried out which are classified as data-centric, hierarchical and location based depending on the network structure. Then some of the multipath routing protocols which are widely used in WSNs like Multipath Multispeed Protocol (MMSPEED), Braided Multipath Routing Protocol, Energy-Aware Routing to improve network performance are also discussed. Massive research work has already been carried out in past to introduce some of the effective routing protocols to enable robust communication system in WSN. Advantages and disadvantages of each routing algorithm are discussed thereafter. This paper also discusses the critical open issues that are yet to be solved. This paper compares and summarizes the performances of routing protocols.