Abstract
Recent few years has seen a tremendous advancement in wireless communication technology. This advancement has opened a door for researchers to work in the area of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) for use in a broad array of real-life applications. An enormous number of remotely deployed autonomous sensors gather data from their vicinity and communicate it to the base station after processing. The sensors communicate through some wireless strategies governed by routing protocols, which has a great impact on the performance of sensor networks. With this insight, we extensively surveyed routing protocols for WSNs. The network structure leads to the broad classification of WSNs' protocols in three foremost classes: flat, hierarchical, and location based routing. Cluster-based routing provides certain advantages over others like scalability, increased network lifetime and efficient data aggregation. In this work, we study and provide a detailed survey of famous hierarchical routing protocols, a taxonomy of hierarchical routing protocols along with the design challenges and also present a comparative analysis based on their traits and limitations.