Classification of usual protocols over Wireless Sensor Networks

Applications over Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are growing quickly. Various parameters may be considered to configure a network functioning but there is a lack of methodologies able to guide to choose the most appropriate parameters for any specific situation. An application can be characterized as one of the following three applications: a regular application, an application requiring a high communication rate, and a burst rate based application. In WSNs, the following routing protocols are usually used: AODV, AOMDV, DSDV and DSR. The ZigBee protocol was designed based on the assumption that infrastructure nodes have a constant power supply and low-rate wireless personal area networks. In the ZigBee Medium Access Control (MAC) layer, there exists two system parameters which provide a power-saving mechanism: macBeaconOrder (BO) and macSuperFrameOrder (SO). We are convinced that the choice of the appropriate protocol in each layer will surely have an impact on the whole network functioning. In this paper, we intend to observe the impact of these choices on the performances in the purpose of getting a useful classification. These analyses are conducted through the NS-2 simulator. We have experimented various routing protocols, BO and SO values on different kinds of applications in order to observe two relevant indicators on WSNs: energy consumption and lost packet rate.