Abstract

The latest advances in the wireless technology have inspired many researchers to propose several protocols for routing data in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Energy consumption is the most essential feature of an efficient routing protocol, affecting the network’s lifetime. Taking this into account, many protocols have been proposed. This paper aims to study and analyze the routing protocols based on important factors faced in achieving energy-efficiency. The classification initially proposed by Pantazis.A, Nikolidakis.A and Vergados.D is further enhanced. New protocols that have been proposed concerning the latest technologies such as Internet of Things (IoT) have been included in the paper. The study highlights the advantages as well as the performance issues of the considered routing techniques. The energy efficient protocols have further been analyzed based on seven important parameters which are scalability, mobility, overhead, delay, robustness, route metric and the routing scheme. The analysis helps the designers to understand the various techniques used to achieve energy efficiency, thus helping them choose the best suiting energy-efficient routing protocol based on their needs.