Performance analysis of AODV, AODVUU, AOMDV and RAODV over IEEE 802.15.4 in wireless sensor networks

In this paper the focus is on the performance study of four routing protocols, namely AODV, AODVUU, RAODV and AOMDV. We call these protocols AODV family of protocols as all these protocols consider AODV as the base routing protocol upon which these protocols are improved. Even though AODV and AODVUU are not different protocols, we wanted to see if there is any improvement in using the AODVUU implementation for a sensor network environment. We have investigated whether a multiple path algorithm like AOMDV would result in more data delivery as compared to single path solutions like AODV in a sensor network. Also, the reverse route discovery mechanisms employed in RAODV is checked for a sensor network. There is a need to understand the versatile behavioral aspects of these routing protocols in a wireless sensor network with varying traffic loads and the number of sources. All these protocols are simulated using NS-2 over IEEE 802.15.4. We also claim that our work is the first of its kind to study and compare the performance of all these four routing protocols from a sensor network point of view by extensively using various performance metrics like packet delivery ratio, average network delay, network throughput and normalized routing load.