Performance evaluation of routing protocols for wireless sensor networks in military scenarios

Surveillance and reconnaissance applications in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are primarily intended to detect, identify and track adjacent hostile targets in military environments. These applications require the high reliability in acquiring the precise information on the enemy and they pursue energy-efficiency to ensure the longevity of their mission. Until now, although a lot of routing protocols have been proposed to route packets towards destinations reliably and efficiently, there exists no routing protocol which is designed for such applications only. In this work, we therefore investigate the applicability of existing WSN routing protocols (BVR, MINT, GRAB and ZBR) to military sensor networks through simulation study regarding the four performance metrics: packet delivery ratio, average end-to-end delay, control packet overhead and the average amount of energy consumption.