A survey of energy-efficient and QoS-aware routing protocols for wireless sensor networks

Recent developments in wireless communications have enabled the development of low-cost, low-power wireless sensor networks (WSN) with wide applicability, including environment and vehicle-health monitoring. Minimizing energy consumption and hence maximizing the life time of the network are key requirements in the design of optimum sensor networking protocols and algorithms. Several routing protocols with different objectives have already been proposed for energy-efficient WSN applications. This paper surveys a sample of existing energy-efficient cluster-based and QoS-aware routing protocols and highlights their key features, including strengths and weaknesses.