Performance evaluation of routing protocols for wireless sensor networks in forest fire detection application

Nowadays, the wireless sensor networks have critical applications in the environmental monitoring, medical, security, industrial and military fields. The forest fire detection as a monitoring network is one of these applications. Sensors collect dynamic changes such as temperature, humidity, smoke, atmospheric pressure and forward those to a single node or a base station. These informations are sent to a long-distance data server which is located in a fire center. Due to the importance of these networks and their ability of real-time monitoring, they should be a reliable network communications. On the other hand, due to the limitations of sensors in processing, memory and energy resource, we need protocols that consider these limitations, especially energy. Energy consumption is important because sensors are often remote, or are located in hazardous areas. Typically, the energy resources are very small batteries that are not rechargeable and replaceable. In this paper, the performance of three routing protocols: AODV, DSR, DSDV in the forest fire detection application based on a zigbee wireless sensor network are compared. The metrics for this comparison are average end-to-end delay, packet delivery ratio and energy consumption. We evaluate their performance using NS-2. Our results show that AODV is the best between these three protocols regarding packet delivery ratio but is the worst regarding energy consumption.