A Survey on Routing Protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks

A wireless sensor network is a specialized wireless network consisting of a large number of sensors and at least one base station. The most important difference between the wireless sensor network and the traditional wireless network is that sensors are extremely sensitive to energy consumption. Energy saving is the main issue in designing the wireless sensor network. So it is necessary to design effective and energy aware protocols in order to improve the network lifetime. This paper surveys routing protocols for wireless sensor networks. The three main categories explored in this paper are data-centric, hierarchical and location-based.