A Review of Energy Efficient and Secure Routing for Internet of Things Based Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

The integration of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) with the Internet of Things (IoT) has revolutionized a wide range of industries, from environmental monitoring to industrial automation. The two major challenges of WSN are energy efficiency and network security. Designing a routing protocol considering both energy efficiency and security is a critical challenge due to the constrained nature of nodes and their susceptibility to malicious attacks. Additionally, the routing protocols designed for conventional WSNs are not suitable for IoT-based WSNs because of their diverse and complex nature. This survey presents a review of energy-efficient and secure routing models specifically designed for IoT-based WSN from the years 2019 to 2025. The collected routing models are categorized as energy-efficient, energy and security based, and energy and trust-based schemes. An analytical summary of routing protocols focusing on factors such as energy efficiency, heterogeneity, scalability, data aggregation, multipath, quality of service and multi-hop communication is presented. Finally, the survey addresses open issues, challenges, and future directions within the field, thereby motivating forthcoming research works.