Abstract
This paper is intended to serve as an overview of, and mostly a short tutorial to illustrate, the optimization techniques used in several different key design problems that have been considered in the literature of routing over wireless sensor networks. For each routing design problem, a key paper that implements optimization techniques is selected, and for each we present the formulation techniques and the solution methods implemented. We observed that good formulation is the key to fully exploiting the features of the techniques. Hence we focus on presenting the formulation techniques, to facilitate the use of "on the shelf" efficient algorithms in the operations research literature. This we believe will help researchers in better understanding the issues and how to improve further on solution techniques.