A Study of Data Forwarding in Wireless Sensor Networks

In a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN), there are a large number of nodes whose power supply and computational capability are limited. The nodes in a wireless sensor network can be fixed or move randomly. Thus in these networks, to forward a data packet from one node to another needs to use specific strategies with very different characteristics. Accordingly the data forwarding strategy among nodes plays an important role and it has been considered a vital research topic over the past decades. This paper surveys the relatively new existing data forwarding strategies in wireless sensor networks and proposes a classification scheme to categorize the strategies into various classes in line with the issues they address. Finally the paper investigates open issues for future research.