Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks Using Optimization Techniques: A Survey

Over the past few decades, one of the important advancements in wireless communication is low cost and limited power devices known as wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Sensor nodes are used to transmit data but have limited amount of energy. As the transmission takes place, energy gets depleted. So energy consumption and network lifetime are the major challenges in a WSN. Much research has been done in the past years to determine an optimal path between source and destination nodes, which will result in maximizing energy conservation of a network. However, the challenge is to create a routing algorithm that takes into consideration the major issues of minimizing energy consumption and maximizing network lifetime. Various optimization techniques are available to determine a routing path between a source node and destination node. In this article, we look into the details of routing in WSN using different optimization techniques. This article provides us a comprehensive summary of the previous studies in field of WSN during the span of 2010–2019. The results provided in this article provide the future insight for researchers to fill in existing gaps in the WSN research field and to find new research trends in this area.