Performance evaluation of a routing protocol for wireless sensor networks

A wireless sensor network with a large number of small sensor nodes can be used as an effective tool for gathering data in various situations. Energy is a critical resource in wireless sensor networks and system lifetime needs to be prolonged through the use of energy-aware strategies during system operation. Routing protocols in WSNs might differ depending on the application and network architecture. Many routing protocols have been specifically designed for WSNs where energy awareness is an essential design issue. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the efficiency of a routing protocol named directed flooding which is a fault-tolerant and energy efficient routing protocol for wireless sensor networks. This protocol is based on the flooding routing protocol, in which energy consumption is decreased and levels of fault-tolerance is increased. This is done by sending data in a specific aperture instead of broadcasting, which is used in the traditional flooding algorithm. A simulator is developed for evaluation of this protocol. The results of simulation are presented and analyzed