A Comprehensive Survey on Routing Schemes and Challenges in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN)

This paper adds to the broad investigation of routing protocols in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). It summarizes the contributions of different researchers in improving the overall performance of WSNs by developing various new and modified routing techniques for general and specific applications in the various field of engineering and technology. A pool of almost 60 research papers and more than 20 survey papers related to various routing techniques were studied thoroughly and represented in a lucid form to help future researchers to contribute effectively in the field of sensor networks. The survey papers considered for this literature are classified for routing algorithms based on the quality of service (QoS), intelligence-based routing (IBR), and routing for dedicated applications while the current research work is distinguished based on cluster head selection phenomenon, forwarding node and other factors contributing to the performance improvement of routing algorithms as per the current focus on routing is concerned. A comparative analysis of the latest contributions in the paper mainly focuses on routing schemes, the parameters are taken into account, and comparison to existing routing techniques as a large amount of research work was concentrated on reducing energy consumption during routing, energy balancing followed by increasing network lifespan, reducing delay, PDR and throughput. The main aim as per the paper included in our study was to design a routing strategy that would keep the network activity for a longer period as possible by reducing the energy required for various operations by an individual sensor node and maintain the overall energy of the nodes to be balanced over their lifetime. Lastly, the paper contributes to discussing the challenges in constructing a routing protocol (RP) for WSN considering the interdependency of various network parameters.