A Comprehensive Performance Evaluation of Proactive, Reactive and Hybrid Routing in Wireless Sensor Network for Real Time Monitoring System

The effectiveness of a Wireless Sensor Network can be relying on the right election of routing protocol. However, the characteristics of protocols vary according to the application requirements: energy conservation, scalability, or real-time communication. As they are recently developed to support plenty of applications on industrial environments, monitoring system has played a central role. That system needs a real-time communication remembering that most of WSNs are often located in an inaccessible zone. In this paper, we present substantial study and comprehensive performance evaluation of three major categories of WSN protocols namely proactive, reactive and hybrid routing protocols. We analyzed their quality-of-service performance issues based on the following metrics: throughput, end-to-end delay, and packet delivery ratio, with varying number of nodes in order to know the affects of network scalability particularly. Results were obtained that a protocol is not always able to meet all the feature needs in WSN applications. There are so many points of view to find the best routing protocol in order to meet the industrial needs. For the real-time monitoring systems, we conclude proactive protocol for better delay transmission, reactive protocol is better for the reliability communication, and last is hybrid protocol for better throughput.