For the latest ten years, many authors have focused their investigations
in wireless sensor networks. Different researching issues have
been extensively developed: power consumption, MAC protocols, selforganizing
network algorithms, data-aggregation schemes, routing protocols,
QoS management, etc. Due to the constraints on data processing
and power consumption, the use of artificial intelligence has been historically
discarded. However, in some special scenarios the features of
neural networks are appropriate to develop complex tasks such as path
discovery. In this paper, we explore the performance of two very well
known routing paradigms, directed diffusion and Energy-Aware Routing,
and our routing algorithm, named SIR, which has the novelty of being
based on the introduction of neural networks in every sensor node. Extensive
simulations over our wireless sensor network simulator, OLIMPO,
have been carried out to study the efficiency of the introduction of neural
networks. A comparison of the results obtained with every routing protocol
is analyzed. This paper attempts to encourage the use of artificial
intelligence techniques in wireless sensor nodes
