Qualitative Analysis of Routing Protocols in WSN

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is partially distributed autonomous sensors to monitor physical or environmental conditions such as temperature, pressure etc. and to cooperatively pass their data through the network to the central location. The technique referred to as multi-hop wireless communications is used by the WSN's to communicate. Due to the limited processing power and the finite power accessible to each sensor nodes, the application of regular routing techniques is not recommended. Hence recent advances in wireless sensor networks have made the routing protocols more efficient. This paper surveys and compares the advanced routing protocols. The three main categories discussed here are flat based, hierarchical based and location based. The paper concludes with open research issues.