Systematic Study of Clustering and Routing in Mobile Wireless Sensor Networks

Mobile Wireless Sensor Networks (MWSNs) that considers sensor node mobility have seen rapid growth in recent years because of their commendable capabilities of data sensing, wireless communication, and data processing. Clustering and routing in MWSNs are a major concern that pose challenges, where the nodes are grouped together as clusters with a Cluster Head (CH) selected for data gathering and transmission to Base Station (BS) or sink. Various issues like fault tolerance, node failure, propagation delay, localization, positioning of nodes, and limited resources, cause ineffective CH selection and routing in MWSNs. This survey provides a comprehensive analysis of various approaches for CH selection and routing with special focus on MWSN, exploring how these methods are applied in networks from different environmental settings to address the challenges. The paper also presents a comparative analysis of the existing methods giving the introduced technique’s name, its advantages, limitations, as well as the performance metrics used for analysis. Finally, the applications of WSN and challenges faced by the existing models with future directions are provided at the end of the paper.