Abstract
A Wireless Sensor Network consists of sensor nodes distributed over the region that communicate among them through the wireless medium. Wireless Sensor Network must be managed automatically with minimum number of human intervention and changes its state by maintaining its quality. The important feature of sensor network is the data collection. Each sensor node has the ability to gather information, analyze that information and route them to a designated location. Routing algorithm plays a major role in routing the packets to the sink point. A survey of routing protocols has done in this paper using various performance metrics viz, energy consumption, data aggregation, scalability, computation overhead, data delivery model, network lifetime, optimal route of the wireless sensor networks.