Routing protocols for wireless sensor networks: What the literature says?

Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) plays a significant role in the field of environment-oriented monitoring, traffic monitoring, etc. Here, wide contributions that are made toward routing in WSN are explored. The paper mainly aims to categorize the routing problems and examines the routing-related optimization problems. For achieving the motive, 50 papers from the standard journals are collected and primarily reviewed in a chronological way. Later, various features that are related to energy, security, speed and reliability problems of routing are discussed. Subsequently, the literature is analyzed based on the simulation environment and experimental setup, awareness over the Quality of Service (QoS) and the deployment against various applications. In addition, the optimization of the routing algorithms and the meta-heuristic study of routing optimization are explored. Routing is a vast area with numerous unsolved issues and hence, various research gaps along with future directions are also presented.