Simulation of Gravity and Flooding algorithm for Wireless Sensor Network

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is a network of sensors that has a very large scale of nodes with a tight resources limitation. WSN is application specific, with a wide range of applications in military, survey, industrial, up to home usage. The major problems for WSN are resource limitations and dynamic network, which require unique algorithms for unique applications. Our study focused on the implementation and the characterization of the Gravity algorithm, with the Flooding algorithm as a comparison. The Gravity algorithm uses the gravity weight which is stored on each node to form a virtual contour. This contour will guide the message to reach the sink. This work is the first implementation of the Gravity model in OMNeT++. Simulations conducted in the full mesh and the layered topology show that the Gravity algorithm uses less energy and a higher diversity factor compared to the Flooding algorithm. A similar result is also acquired when the probability of failures are considered. The result shows that the Gravity algorithm outperforms the Flooding algorithm while still maintaining the simplicity of the algorithm. This is important to a WSN which is resources limited. Only a small amount of memory is needed for the gravity weight calculation and storage.