## 1 Introduction
\begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c c} \hline \hline
**Acronyms** & **Description** & **Acronyms** & **Description** \\ \hline ACO & Ant Colony Optimization & ANNs & Artificial Neural Networks \\ BCO & Bee Colony Optimization & BDAT & Big Data Analysis Tool \\ CAN & Concrete Architecture for & & CH & Cluster Head \\  & Novel-protocol design & & \\ CI & Computationally Intelligent & CLR & Comprehensible Literature Review \\ CNI & Count Number Index & DHT & Distributed Hash Table \\ DoS & Denial of Service & DRF & Design issues, requirements and \\  & & characteristics of Research Field \\ FDT & Future Directions \& Trends & FL & Fuzzy Logic \\ FoA & Fields of Application & GA & Genetic Algorithm \\ GPS & Global Positioning System & GSDF & General Survey Design Framework \\ Hg & High (value of CNI) & Lw & Low (value of CNI) \\ Md & Medium (value of CNI) & NS-2 & Network Simulator 2 \\ NoR & Novelty of Research & OSI & Open Systems Interconnection \\ PCA & Proper Comparison Approach & PSO & Particle Swarm Optimization \\ QoS & Quality of Service & QS & Quorum Sensing \\ Rk & Rank (based on CNI) & RD & Reaction Diffusion \\ RL & Reinforcement Learning & SMO & Spider Monkey Optimization \\ TCO & Termite Colony Optimization & UASNs & Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks \\ UWSNs & Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks & WMSNs & Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks \\ WPT & Wireless Power Technology & WRSNs & Wireless Rechargeable Sensor Networks \\ WSNs & Wireless Sensor Networks & XL & Cross-Layered \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 1: Listing of acronyms with description. Apart from the different protocols operating at various layers of communication protocol stack, a variety of WSNs based routing protocols are devised that operate at network layer and focus on performance improvement and fairness in terms of energy, throughput, delay, reliability, security and so on. When a reasonable number of WSNs based routing protocols are published and relevant issues are highlighted, then the experienced researchers in this area have taken the initiative for writing a variety of worthy routing-related reviews which focus either entirely or partially on different aspects of routing in WSNs. These reviews include classical [35; 36], multipath [37], energy-efficient [38; 39], secure [40], intelligent [41], hierarchical [42], mobility based [43; 44] surveys and so on as outlined in Tables 2 and 3. In these surveys, the researchers have either completely or partially summarized and categorized the relevant routing protocols for WSNs and also identified the open research issues/challenges. It has helped the research community to concisely understand the particular and somehow unrevealed aspects of various areas of routing in WSNs and motivated them to further explore the unresolved routing-related challenges in WSNs in future. Although a large number of routing-related surveys are published so far for WSNs, however to the best of our knowledge, we have not discovered any review that summarizes the routing-related survey literature in WSNs. To bridge this gap, an effort is made in this paper for analyzing and categorizing the published routing-related survey literature in WSNs. Therefore, the main contributions of this research can be delineated as follows:  
* Outlining a novel _general survey design framework_ that may analyze routing-related survey literature in WSNs under a variety of concrete design requirements as discussed in Section 3. * Analyzing the published routing-related survey literature in the light of _general survey design framework_ as manifested in Tables 2 and 3. * Presenting a novel taxonomy of routing-related surveys in WSNs which, on the basis of _frequency of survey publication_, categorizes the routing surveys literature into highly-focused, medium-focused and least-focused areas of survey publication in WSNs as shown in the organization chart in  
Figure 1: Organization of Paper.