Investigation of routing protocols in a sensor network using resource based models

Energy efficiency is of paramount importance in sensor networks that are constrained by limited resources. Designing an efficient routing protocol for a sensor network is challenging due to factors such as limited resources, concentration of load in a limited portion of the network, and routing of redundant information. An object oriented programming (OOP) paradigm was used to develop a resource-based sensor network model that can be used to study routing protocols. In this work, simulation was used to compare the performance of different exemplary routing protocols in a target tracking application. A concept called localized optimization was introduced to allow routing protocols to be locally optimized at the cluster level. Simulation results demonstrated that the localized optimization algorithm provided a significant improvement in the functional lifetime of the sensor network at the expense of a degradation of tracking performance due to delays introduced in the system.