Abstract
Routing protocols play a vital role in wireless sensor networks because of its dynamic topology and its nodes limited battery lifetime. In wireless sensor context, saving consumed energy is a crucial task that affects the overall network performance. Researchers exert great efforts to develop energy saving protocols that protract the network lifetime. As such, analyzing routing protocols with respect to total energy dissipation, network lifetime is strongly required. This paper provides a comparative study to extract the key features of various energy aware routing protocols. Two of these protocols are implemented to draw an efficient evaluation procedure to design energy saving routing protocols.