For the latest 10 years, many authors have focused their investigations in wireless sensor networks. Different researching issues have
been extensively developed: power consumption, MAC protocols, self-organizing 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
