Abstract: Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) consists of a large number of sensor nodes to detect some physical phenomena. To design a WSN it is necessary to identify the major issues or the main metric parameters of WSN, which are network lifetime, data gathering, and security. These parameters effect on the overall performance of WSN. To enhance the performance of that network in this paper, we present a survey study of the methods and proposed algorithms that were used to overcome those issues. A number of challenges and research issues emerging from this survey study have been reported for further investigations.