Recent advances in wireless sensor networks have led to many new protocols specifically designed for sensor networks where energy awareness is an essential consideration. Most of the attention, however, has been given to the routing protocols since they might differ depending on the application and network architecture. This paper surveys recent routing protocols for sensor networks and presents a classification for the various approaches pursued. The three main categories explored in this paper are data-centric, hierarchical and location-based. Each routing protocol is described and discussed under the appropriate category. Moreover, protocols using contemporary methodologies such as network flow and quality of service modeling are also discussed. The paper concludes with open research issues.

No abstract

No abstract

Recent advances in wireless sensor networks have led to many new routing protocols specifically designed for sensor networks. Almost all of these routing protocols considered energy efficiency as the ultimate objective in order to maximize the whole network lifetime. However, the introduction of video and imaging sensors has posed additional challenges. Transmission of video and imaging data requires both energy and QoS aware routing in order to ensure efficient usage of the sensors and effective access to the gathered measurements. In this paper, we propose an energy-aware QoS routing protocol for sensor networks which can also run efficiently with best-effort traffic. The protocol finds a least-cost, delay-constrained path for real-time data in terms of link cost that captures nodes' energy reserve, transmission energy, error rate and other communication parameters. Moreover, the throughput for non-real-time data is maximized by adjusting the service rate for both real-time and non-real-time data at the sensor nodes. Simulation results have demonstrated the effectiveness of our approach for different metrics.