An Empirical Evaluation of Lightweight RandomWalk Based Routing Protocol in Duty Cycle AwareWireless Sensor Networks

Abstract EN

Energy efficiency is an important design paradigmin Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) and its consumption indynamic environment is even more critical.

Duty cycling ofsensor nodes is used to address the energy consumption problem.

However, along with advantages, duty cycle aware networksintroduce some complexities like synchronization and latency.

Due to their inherent characteristics, many traditional routingprotocols show low performance in densely deployed WSNs withduty cycle awareness, when sensor nodes are supposed to havehigh mobility.

In this paper we first present a three messagesexchange Lightweight Random Walk Routing (LRWR) protocoland then evaluate its performance in WSNs for routing low datarate packets.

Through NS-2 based simulations, we examine theLRWR protocol by comparing it with DYMO, a widely used WSNprotocol, in both static and dynamic environments with varyingduty cycles, assuming the standard IEEE 802.15.4 in lower layers.

Results for the three metrics, that is, reliability, end-to-end delay,and energy consumption, show that LRWR protocol outperformsDYMO in scalability, mobility, and robustness, showing thisprotocol as a suitable choice in low duty cycle and dense WSNs.