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. The performance of the simulator is validated with a comparative study of Directed Diffusion Routing Protocol on both ns2 and SensorSimulator. Then the simulations are done to evaluate the performance of Optimized Broadcast Protocols for Sensor Networks, Efficient Coordination Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks on SensorSimulator. Also a performance study of Random Asynchronous Wakeup protocol for Sensor Networks is done on ns2

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I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Dr. Arjan Durresi, my advisor, for his invaluable guidance and encouragement extended throughout the study. His tenacious supervision, helpful suggestion, patience and time deserve a special mention I would like to express my appreciation to my committee members Dr. S.S.Iyengar, Dr.Bijaya B. Karki and Dr.Seung-Jong Park for their support and suggestions. I would also like to thank my colleagues Vamsi Paruchuri, Cariappa Mallanda, Varma Indukuri and Ankur Suri and all other friends for their support and suggestions during the progress of this thesis. I thank my parents Mr. Nagesh K and Mrs. Manjula K and my brother for their continued support and encouragement in the course of doing my Master’s degree. Last, but not the least, I would like to gratefully acknowledge Department of Computer Science, Louisiana State University for providing the resources and needs during the thesis. i