Development of Routing Protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks have numerous exciting applications in virtually all fields of science and engineering, including health care, industry, military, security, environmental science, geology, agriculture, and social studies. The routing protocols developed for these distributed sensor networks need to be energy efficient and scalable. Geographic information based routing algorithms have been demonstrated to represent an effective way of finding the appropriate next hop relay nodes by utilizing the location information while avoiding the large number of control packets necessary for route discovery in wireless sensor networks. In this thesis, we propose Energy Aware Geographic Routing Protocol (EAGRP) routing algorithm in a wireless sensor network. Where, we optimize the greedy forwarding mode. The proposed protocol is an efficient and energy conservative routing technique for multi-hop wireless sensor networks. The significance of this study is that there have been very limited investigations of the effect of mobility models on routing protocol performance in Wireless Sensor Networks. We have considered the influence of random way point mobility models on the performance of EAGRP routing protocol. We evaluate the performance of EAGRP against three other protocol approaches GPSR, DSR, AODV. Our simulation results indicate that the proposed algorithm gives better performance in terms of higher packet delivery ratio, throughput, energy consumption, routing overhead, and delay. In wireless sensor networks, congestion occurs when the traffic load being offered exceeds the available capacity of sensor nodes. In most applications, every sensor node will send the event it has sensed to a destination node. This operation makes the sensors closer to the destination, resulting in congestion. Congestion may cause packets loss, lower network throughput and sensor energy waste. Therefore, effective congestion control and loss recovery approach can be considered as effective solution to this problem. We modify TCP congestion control for use in wireless sensor networks. We show that by slightly modifying the algorithm of the TCP, it can be made to respond better to wireless links, while maintaining its advantages on the wired networks at the same time. This is certainly a very desirable feature as the conventional TCP in most cases contradicts to the demands of the wireless links of the network. Simulation results indicate that in wireless sensor networks, modified TCP outperforms traditional TCP algorithm in terms of sending data and information due to its better average throughput, average end-to-end delay, average retransmission, congestion window size, and energy consumption in both high and low traffic.