A mobile wireless sensor network (MWSN) can simply be defined as a wireless sensor network (WSN) in which the sensor nodes are mobile. MWSNs are a smaller, emerging field of research in contrast to their well-established predecessor. MWSNs are much more versatile than static sensor networks as they can be deployed in any scenario and cope with rapid topology changes. However, many of their applications are similar, such as environment monitoring or surveillance. Commonly, the nodes consist of a radio transceiver and a microcontroller powered by a battery, as well as some kind of sensor for detecting light, heat, humidity, temperature, etc.

Broadly speaking, there are two sets of challenges in MWSNs; hardware and environment. The main hardware constraints are limited battery power and low cost requirements. The limited power means that it's important for the nodes to be energy efficient. Price limitations often demand low complexity algorithms for simpler microcontrollers and use of only a simplex radio. The major environmental factors are the shared medium and varying topology. The shared medium dictates that channel access must be regulated in some way. This is often done using a medium access control (MAC) scheme, such as carrier-sense multiple access (CSMA), frequency-division multiple access (FDMA) or code-division multiple access (CDMA). The varying topology of the network comes from the mobility of nodes, which means that multihop paths from the sensors to the sink are not stable.

Currently there is no standard for MWSNs, so often protocols from MANETs are borrowed, such as Associativity-Based Routing (AR), Ad hoc On-Demand Distance Vector Routing (AODV), Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) and Greedy Perimeter Stateless Routing (GPSR). MANET protocols are preferred as they are able to work in mobile environments, whereas WSN protocols often aren't suitable.

Topology selection plays an important role in routing because the network topology decides the transmission path of the data packets to reach the proper destination. Here, all the topologies (Flat / Unstructured, cluster, tree, chain and hybrid topology) are not feasible for reliable data transmission on sensor nodes mobility. Instead of single topology, hybrid topology plays a vital role in data collection, and the performance is good. Hybrid topology management schemes include the Cluster Independent Data Collection Tree (CIDT). and the Velocity Energy-efficient and Link-aware Cluster-Tree (VELCT); both have been proposed for mobile wireless sensor networks (MWSNs).

Since there is no fixed topology in these networks, one of the greatest challenges is routing data from its source to the destination. Generally these routing protocols draw inspiration from two fields; WSNs and mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). WSN routing protocols provide the required functionality but cannot handle the high frequency of topology changes. Whereas, MANET routing protocols can deal with mobility in the network but they are designed for two way communication, which in sensor networks is often not required.

Protocols designed specifically for MWSNs are almost always multihop and sometimes adaptations of existing protocols. For example, Angle-based Dynamic Source Routing (ADSR), is an adaptation of the wireless mesh network protocol Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) for MWSNs. ADSR uses location information to work out the angle between the node intending to transmit, potential forwarding nodes and the sink. This is then used to insure that packets are always forwarded towards the sink. Also, Low Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy (LEACH) protocol for WSNs has been adapted to LEACH-M (LEACH-Mobile), for MWSNs. The main issue with hierarchical protocols is that mobile nodes are prone to frequently switching between clusters, which can cause large amounts of overhead from the nodes having to regularly re-associate themselves with different cluster heads.

Another popular routing technique is to utilise location information from a GPS module attached to the nodes. This can be seen in protocols such as Zone Based Routing (ZBR), which defines clusters geographically and uses the location information to keep nodes updated with the cluster they're in. In comparison, Geographically Opportunistic Routing (GOR), is a flat protocol that divides the network area into grids and then uses the location information to opportunistically forward data as far as possible in each hop.

Multipath protocols provide a robust mechanism for routing and therefore seem like a promising direction for MWSN routing protocols. One such protocol is the query based Data Centric Braided Multipath (DCBM).