Performance comparison of reactive and proactive routing protocols in Wireless Sensor Network

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is a group of spatially distributed sensor nodes and is self organized and autonomous in nature. They are connected by wireless links. Routing in wireless sensor network is quite different from traditional wireless network, due to limitations of wireless sensor network. To overcome some of the limitations, UDP is being used for connection establishment, compromising the reliability of communication. In this research work, we have analyzed the performance of three routing protocols from different categories. We have analyzed the performance of AODV, Directed Diffusion and SPIN routing protocols in different wireless sensor network scenarios (varying number of nodes and network type), by using TCP, instead of UDP for connection establishment. The performance of protocols in different scenario is being analyzed by using Network Simulator (NS-2), along with Network Animator (NAM) and AWK scripts. The performance matrices include Packet Delivery Ratio, Throughput, End to End Delay, Residual Energy and Normalized Routing Load. We mainly tried to address the behavior of different protocols, when reliability is given preference, by varying their working environments. Upon analyzing the results obtained after simulation, it has been concluded that Directed diffusion isn't giving satisfactory performance among the three.