Empirical Examination of Mobile Ad Hoc Routing Protocols on Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have great potential of being deployed in many places where traditional wired or wireless networks are not feasible. But they have also many new challenges more than other wireless networks. These challenges include the design of embedded intelligent sensors and wireless networking technology, ie. routing protocols and network security. WSNs also have some constraints such as sensor nodes failure which render WSN unavailable. The routing protocol in the sensor networks plays a critical role. They influence the performance of the WSNs and have significant impact on the security and the availability of WSNs. Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been regarded as an incarnation of Ad Hoc Networks for a specific application. Since a WSN consists of potentially hundreds of low cost, small size and battery powered sensor nodes, it has more potentials than a MANET to be deployed in many emerging areas. However, they also raised many new challenges, and these challenges include the design of embedded sensors and wireless networking technology, ie. routing protocols and network security. Many ad hoc routing protocols such as AODV, DSR, DSDR, TORA and OLSR, which have been developed particularly for the mobile wireless ad hoc networks (MANETs), performed satisfactorily on MANETs. Research has shown that these ad-hoc routing protocols work well for MANETs with different characteristics and requirements. In this paper, we investigate how well these ad-hoc routing protocols work on wireless sensor networks (WSNs). We focus on their performances in terms of average end-toend delay, packet delivery ratio and routing overheads.