Wireless networks involve spatially extended independent sensor nodes, and it is associated with each other's to preserve and identify physical and environmental conditions of the particular application. The sensor nodes batteries are equipped with restricted energy for working with an energy source. Consequently, efficient energy consumption is themain important challenge in wireless networks, and it is outfitted witharestricted power storage capacity battery. Therefore, routing protocol with energy efficiency is essential in wireless sensor network (WSN) to offer data transmission and connectivity with less energy consumption. As a result, the routing scheme is the main factor for decreasing energy consumption and the network's lifetime. The energy-aware routing model is mainly devised for WSN with high network performance when transmitting data to a sink node. Hence, in this paper, the effectiveness of energy-aware routing protocols in mobile sink-based WSNs is analyzed and justified. Some energy-aware routing systems in mobile sink-based WSN techniques, such as optimizing low-energy adaptive clustering hierarchy (LEACH) clustering approach, hybrid model using fuzzy logic, and mobile sink. The fuzzy TOPSIS-based cluster head selection (CHS) technique, mobile sink-based energy-efficient CHS model, and hybrid Harris Hawk-Salp Swarm (HH-SS) optimization approach are taken for the simulation process. Additionally, the analytical study is executed using various conditions, like simulation, cluster size, nodes, mobile sink speed, and rounds. Moreover, the performance of existing methods is evaluated using various parameters, namely alive node, residual energy, delay, and packet delivery ratio (PDR). © 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston.