Wireless sensor network (WSN) is frequently being used for increasing the data collection and monitoring critical parameters. Major challenge in WSN design is achieving the better energy efficiency and latency considering the dynamic sink location. Lots of research has been done for improving the performance of WSN systems in wide range of applications. Prime goal of this paper is to evaluate the performance of WSN routing under the grid-based dynamic sink locations. Later the performance of various existing critical protocols is compared to route data over centralized server. Various applications of WSNs are tabulated along with the sensor utilization. The paper contributed in three passes. Initial contribution of this research is to identify the issues and limitations of present WSN communication technologies. The paper contributed to present a case study to discover the implications of dynamic sink routing for building protocol to extend network's lifetime. The effectiveness of several clustering-based WSN routing algorithms is first compared in this paper. After that, the protocol with the longest network life is put to the test under a grid-based dynamic sink routing scenario. The significance of clustering-based protocols for improving lifetime of the network is evaluated as case study. The clustering-based energy efficient protocol like low energy adaptive clustering hierarchy (LEACH) and its different variants, PEGASIS, SEP, DEC, their variants, and so on, are compared in this paper. Various performance metrics like network delays, throughput, latency, energy consumption and network lifetime are defined for studying routing protocols. Significance of dynamic sink locations performance is evaluated for Enhanced Distributed Energy Efficient Clustering (EDEEC) protocol. Overall paper covers and reviewed many critical design aspects for WSN networks.