International Journal of Computer Applications (0975 – 8887) Volume 95– No. 11, June 2014 22 A Review on Reactive and Proactive Wireless Sensor Networks Protocols Navneet Kaur Manjinder Singh Kahlon Research Scholar Asstt. Professor Deptt of Computer Science and Engineering Deptt of Computer Science and Engineering D.A.V.I.E.T Jalandhar, D.A.V.I.E.T Jalandhar, Punjab, India. Punjab, India. ABSTRACT WSNs are becoming popular in real world applications. Due to the features of the resource-constrained and battery aware sensors; in WSNs energy utilization has found to be a major interesting subject of research. WSNs compose battery- powered nodes which are connected with the base station to for certain action or task. As sensor nodes are battery-powered i.e. will become dead after the consumption of the battery which is also called lifetime of WSNs. So using the energy in well-organized way may result in prolonging the lifetime of the WSNs. This paper has evaluated and explores the various stable election based protocols to find the short coming of the earlier work in heterogeneous WSNs. Keywords: Wireless Sensor Networks, Stable Election Protocol, Lifetime, Hybrid Energy Efficient Reactive Protocol, Cluster Head, Low Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy, Stable Cluster Head Election Protocol. 1. INTRODUCTION Technology has advanced to an extent such that it has moved from wired to wireless domain. The wireless devices are functionally depending upon their battery life. Wireless communication technologies are continuously growing in diverse areas and provide new and better opportunities for different business environments. Recent development in wireless communication and electronics have empowered the deployment of small, relatively in-expensive and low- power devices called micro sensors that may be connected by a wireless network. These wireless micro sensor networks present a new standard for obtaining data from the surrounding environment and also allow the reliable examining of a number of environments for various applications. 2. ORIGIN OF WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS(WSN s ) The origin of wireless sensor networks traces back to the cold war era where a system of acoustic sensors on the ocean bottom was placed by USA military in 1950 for the sound surveillance to detect and track Soviet submarines. At the same time, US developed the method of air defence radars to defend its territory. Echoing the investments created in Nineteen Sixties and Seventies to develop the hardware for today’s net , the U.S Defence advanced analysis comes agency (DARPA) started Distributed sensing element Network (DSN) program in 1978 to formally explore the challenges in implementing distributed / wireless sensing element networks. With the emergence of DSN and its progress into academia, WSN technology soon found its way into academia and scientific research. Governments and universities began using WSNs in many applications such as forest fire detection, air quality monitoring, and natural disaster prevention. While the commercial demand for WSNs was strong, moving beyond these applications was a challenge. The early military, science/technology were all based on heavy, expensive sensors and possessory networking protocols. These WSNs increased the functionality but other factors such as hardware cost, deployment cost, power consumption, scalability and networking standards were not considered. Reducing WSN deployment costs while increasing functionality involves major advances in sensors, CMOS based semi-conductor devices, networking protocols and energy storage or generation technology. The advancement in semi-conductor, networking and material science technologies are driving the deployment of large-scale WSNs. Together, these technologies have made up to create a new generation of WSNs that are different from the WSNs developed and deployed 5 to 10 years ago. Today’s WSNs have low deployment and maintenance costs, last longer and are more rigorous. Recent advances in sensing, computing and communication technologies coupled with the need to continuously monitor physical phenomenon have led to the development of WSNs. 3. SIGNIFICANCE OF WSNs Wireless sensor networks have gained so much importance over the past few years because of the many applications in which the sensors can be used to monitor and control different physical phenomenon. WSNs are among the most widely used ad-hoc wireless networks. WSNs are referred as infrastructure less networks that are capable of wireless communication. Recent technological advancements have enabled the development of relatively small, inexpensive wireless sensors that consume low power. These sensors can be deployed at a cost much less than those traditional wired systems. Wireless sensor network is a small system that is able to communicate over short distances. This small system is made up of sensor nodes. Sensor nodes can be imagined as small computers, extremely basic in terms of their interfaces and their components. They usually consist of a processing unit with limited computational power and limited memory, sensors or MEMS (including specific conditioning circuitry), a communication device (usually radio transceivers or