Recent Advancements in Energy Ef ficient Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks: A Survey Gaurav Kumar Pandey and Amritpal Singh Abstract Wireless sensor networks have set a new realm in the field of wireless transmission technology. Their applications have diversified over the years and now they cover various sophisticated areas of applications which include military applications, surveillance, agriculture, monitoring and control, etc. This paper covers various recent developments in the field of energy-aware routing techniques to minimize the energy consumption and extend the lifetime of wireless sensor networks. Keywords Energy ef ficient routing Á Balanced clustering Á Learning automata Á Restricted routing Á Virtual backbone networks Á Residual energy 1 Introduction The supremacy of wireless sensor networks became prominent with the arrival of Internet of Things. WSN was able to reach and gather information from those places and environments that are not suitable for humans to visit. They have helped to mine information from deep seabeds to volcanic mountains. But their perfor- mance has always been hindered by their diminutive battery power. To minimize energy depletion of the nodes has always been the center of attraction for researchers. This gave rise to the concept of energy-aware routing protocols for data transmission in WSN. Over the years many energy ef ficient traditional routing protocols were developed such as LEACH, PEGASIS, TEEN, APTEEN, SPIN, etc., to lower the rate of energy dissipation and obtain an increase in the lifetime of wireless sensor networks. But with the advancement of time, many new and much G.K. Pandey (&) Á Amritpal Singh Department of CSE, Lovely Professional University, Phagwara, Punjab, India e-mail: pandeygauravkumar10@gmail.com Amritpal Singh e-mail: apsaggu@live.com © Springer Science+Business Media Singapore 2016 M. Pant et al. (eds.), Proceedings of Fifth International Conference on Soft Computing for Problem Solving, Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing 436, DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-0448-3_30 367