Impact of transmission range in 802.15.4 with usual routing protocols

Applications over Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are growing quickly. Their MAC protocols was designed based on the assumption that infrastructure nodes have a constant power supply and low-rate wireless personal area networks. Various parameters may be considered to configure the network functioning and with multi-hop wireless connectivity, routing protocols must be dynamic and efficient. We are convinced that the choice of the routing protocol will surely have an impact on the whole network functioning. In these networks, the transmission range can impact on these routing protocols and decrease system performances. In addition, we can have over these networks one of the following type of applications: a regular application, an application requiring a high rate, and a burst rate based application. In this paper, we analyze the impact of transmission range in MAC protocols and usual routing protocols such as AODV, AOMDV, DSDV and DSR with various kinds of applications and various network sizes. These analyses are conducted through the NS-2 simulator to analyze two relevant indicators on WSNs: energy consumption and lost packet rate.