Systematic study of topology control methods and routing techniques in wireless sensor networks

Emergence of applications of wireless sensor networks in various fields over time requires to acknowledge existing solutions which have been proposed in history to overcome various challenges/ issues related to topology formation and routing of sensing data among the sensors. Sometime data transmission requires topology establishment or its awareness and sometime it does not. In order to obtain optimal routing topology or an optimal route according to some desired aim, a wide range of topology control methods and routing techniques/protocols come into sight. This article is the very first attempt in offering the collective and combined review on unexplored topology control methods and routing techniques, year-wise. Presenting a comprehensive study of various energy efficient topology control methods involving the graph based methodologies, explicitly designed interference models and related algorithms which have not been covered in previous year survey papers and the detail review on most efficient network structure based classical hierarchical routing protocols, topology aware particle swarm optimization and ant colony optimization based routing techniques in both static and mobile wireless sensor networks. However, the mentioned techniques don't cooperate delay sensitive routing or timely data delivery, for this purpose, we additionally provide a detail review on delay-sensitive real-time routing protocols in this survey paper. Analysis of each technique has been put forth year-wise by mentioning contribution made by the proposed work, detail of methodology opted, merits and demerits. A brief comparative study among the existing techniques, discussion about the research gaps and persisting issues along with direction of future work have also been provided.