Computational intelligence-based energy efficient routing protocols with QoS assurance for wireless sensor networks: a survey

Over the decades, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have reached greatest heights and started to emerge into various applications, ranging from health care to multimedia transmission. In these application domains, energy efficiency and Quality of Service (QoS) assurance remains a challenging issue due to dynamic network conditions and resource-constrained nature of sensor nodes. This challenging issue has received considerable research attention at the network layer, which requires efficient routing protocols to meet the application-specific requirements. Therefore, WSN researchers have turned to different Computational Intelligence (CI) techniques in an attempt to address various routing issues in WSN. This paper presents a systematic survey on CI techniques-based routing protocols in WSN. Moreover, a comparative analysis of reviewed protocols with their strengths and limitations is also included in the survey. Finally, this paper discusses various potential directions which guide the researcher to design efficient routing protocols by combining WSN with CI techniques.