A survey on event-driven and query-driven hierarchical routing protocols for mobile sink-based wireless sensor networks

The sink mobility in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) brings new challenges specifically while designing the routing protocols. The advertisement of the mobile sink location to the sensor nodes is one of these challenges that is a core problem for any routing protocol. To deal with this issue, several hierarchical routing protocols have been developed for different mode of data transmissions, i.e., event-driven and query-driven, in mobile sink-based WSNs (MSWSNs). A routing protocol considers a particular data transmission mode depending on the application requirement. Routing protocols designed for event-driven scenarios do not ensure their efficient working in query-driven scenarios and vice versa. Thus, each application requires some specific designing of routing protocol. By considering the impact of data transmission mode on routing protocols, this paper makes the very first attempt to provide a comprehensive survey on hierarchical routing protocols designed for query-driven and event-driven data transmission scenarios. We provide a comparative study by discussing and describing their functionalities along with their advantages, disadvantages and key performance parameters. To help readers understand the evolution within each category, the relationship among different routing protocols is outlined with detailed descriptions as well as in-depth analysis.