Simulation study of routing protocols in wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks, a distributed network of sensor nodes perform critical tasks in many application areas such as target tracking in military applications, detection of catastrophic events, environment monitoring, health applications etc. The routing protocols developed for these distributed sensor networks need to be energy efficient and scalable. To create a better understanding of the performance of various routing protocols proposed it is very important to perform a detailed analysis of them. Network simulators enable us to study the performance and behavior of these protocols on various network topologies. Many Sensor Network frameworks were developed to explore both the networking issues and the distributed computing aspects of wireless sensor networks. The current work of simulation study of routing protocols is done on SensorSimulator, a discrete event simulation framework developed at Sensor Networks Research Laboratory, LSU and on a popular event driven network simulator ns2 developed at UC Berkeley. SensorSimulator is a discrete event simulation framework for sensor networks built over OMNeT++ (Objective Modular Network Test-bed in C++). This framework allows the user to debug and test software for distributed sensor networks. SensorSimulator allows developers and researchers in the area of Sensor Networks to investigate topological, phenomenological, networking, robustness and scaling issues, to explore arbitrary algorithms for distributed sensors, and to defeat those algorithms through simulated failure. The framework has modules for all the layers of a Sensor Network Protocol stack. This thesis is focused on the simulation and performance evaluation of various routing protocols on SensorSimulator and ns2.