Energy-Efficient Routing Protocols for Wireless Sensor Network : A Survey

179 Abstract— Wireless sensor networks have recently received tremendous attention from both academia and industry because of their promise of numerous potential applications in both civilian and military areas. A wireless sensor network consists of a large number of small sensor nodes with sensing, data processing, and communication capabilities, which are deployed in a region of interest and collaborate to accomplish a common task, a sensor network has many unique characteristics, such as denser node deployment, higher unreliability of sensor nodes, asymmetric data transmission, and severe power, computation, and memory constraints, which present many new challenges for the development and eventual application of wireless sensor networks. In particular, sensor nodes are usually battery-powered and should operate without attendance for a relatively long period of time. In most cases, it is very difficult and even impossible to change or recharge batteries for these sensor nodes. Thus, energy-saving routing protocol in wireless sensor networks is necessary for increasing the network lifetime. In this paper we present a comparative study of different routing algorithms and analysis of same is presented in the paper.