Wireless sensor networks contain various components such as sensing nodes with computational and communicating capabilities. WSN based communication has gained huge attraction from industrial field and researchers due to its significant nature of communication in diverse scenarios in real-time applications such as military application, health monitoring, and civil applications etc. During past decade, ahuge amount of research has been carried out for improving the performance of WSN communication system. Generally, theperformance of wireless sensor network depends on the data collection, routing, and energy consumption minimization. However, these issues have been discussed extensively in previous research but theperformance of WSN is densely deployed environment still remains a challenging task. In this article, we discuss recent studies in the field of WSN. This article presents a review study on WSN routing, WSN localization and load balancing and lifetime enhancement schemes. A comparative analysis is presented based on routing and localization schemes. This study shows that the performance of WSN further can be improved by developing fault-tolerant RSSI based localization, bio-inspired routing algorithms and energy-efficient load balancing schemes.