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.

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Wireless sensor networks have potential to monitor environments for both military and civil applications. Due to inhospitable conditions these sensors are not always deployed uniformly in the area of interest. Since sensors are generally constrained in on-board energy supply, efficient management of the network is crucial to extend the life of the sensors. Sensors' energy cannot support long haul communication to reach a remote command site and thus requires many levels of hops or a gateway to forward the data on behalf of the sensor. In this paper we propose an algorithm to network these sensors in to well define clusters with less-energy-constrained gateway nodes acting as clusterheads, and balance load among these gateways. Simulation results show how our approach can balance the load and improve the lifetime of the system.

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