Performance of Routing Protocols in Very Large Scale Wireless Sensor Networks

With deployment of thousands or even tens of thousands of sensors in a wireless sensor network (WSN) feasible, the scalability of routing protocols has drawn a lot of attention. Routing protocols in ad hoc networks, such as Ad hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV) protocol and its enhanced versions provide one option for the routing design in a large scale WSN. Combining the strengths of AODV with link layer feedback (AODV-LLF) and AODV/Jr, an efficient routing protocol named AODV with Route Identification and RREP Capturing (AODV-RIRC) is proposed to scale up the network scope. AODV-RIRC reduces route search times and thus cut down the control overhead effectively. In our work, based on MIRAI-SF platform, simulations are implemented to prove the scalability of AODV-RIRC when applied to a large scale network with nodes up to 10000, and meanwhile to reveal the potential problems of ad hoc routing protocols when they are applied to a large scale WSN. The simulation results verify that AODV-RIRC outperforms the AODV family protocols in terms of control overhead, energy consumption, and route building time etc.