Routing protocols: When to use it in terms of energy?

This paper proposes a mathematical framework to model and analyze the energy consumption of routing protocols in multihop wireless networks such Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) or Sensor Networks (WSNs) by taking into account the protocol parameters, the traffic pattern and the network characteristics defined by the medium channel properties, the dynamic topology behavior, the network diameter and the nodes density. Moreover, our framework allows to classify routing protocols by exploring the relationship between application requirements and wireless network features. To the best of our knowledge, there is no such proposed framework that provides in-depth an analytical investigation of above relationship. We apply this model to a Beacon-less routing protocol Pizza-Forwarding (PF) compared to well known routing protocols such as Optimized Link State Routing, Ad Hoc On Demand Distance Vector Routing, Greedy Perimeter Stateless Routing and a Simple Random Walk Routing in order to underline their behavior according to the network features and application requirements. Finally, we show that Beacon-less routing protocol should be a best candidate to save energy in WSNs.