  Wireless sensor networks are composed of low cost and extremely power
constrained sensor nodes which are scattered over a region forming self
organized networks, making energy consumption a crucial design issue. Thus,
finite network lifetime is widely regarded as a fundamental performance
bottleneck. These networks are used for various applications such as field
monitoring, home automation, medical data collection or surveillance. Research
has shown that clustering sensor nodes is an efficient method to manage energy
consumption for prolonging the network lifetime. Presence of heterogeneity
enhances the lifetime and reliability in network. In this paper, we present the
distributed and energy efficient clustering protocols which follow the thoughts
of Distributed Energy Efficient Clustering protocol. Objective of our work is
to analyze that how these extended routing protocols work in order to optimize
network lifetime and how routing protocols are improved. We emphasizes on
issues experienced by various protocols and how these issues are tackled by
other enhanced protocols. This provides a survey of work done on distributed
energy efficient protocols
