Over recent years, enormous amounts of research in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been conducted; this is because of its multifarious applications such as in environmental monitoring, object tracking, disaster management, manufacturing, monitoring and control. Nevertheless, optimising the energy consumption of sensor nodes (SNs) in WSNs and realising the anticipated quality of solutions supplied from them present considerable challenges. In WSNs, the sudden ‘death’ of critical nodes can cause an entire network to malfunction. This is usually caused by uneven depletion of battery power of the individual nodes. Therefore, this survey investigates the methods that aim to minimise usage of energy in SNs, especially during routing. This is because network activities start to be challenged when the first SN exhausts its battery. In addition, this paper introduces a comprehensive categorization of the energy‐aware protocols in WSNs. Thus, the motivation of this survey is to present some decentralised energy‐aware routing using optimization methods that is generic and applicable to most of WSN applications that require reduction of energy consumptions and extend a network's life time. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.