A performance comparison of data dissemination protocols for wireless sensor networks (original) (raw)

In recent years a variety of new data dissemination protocols have been developed specifically for wireless sensor networks (WSN), but no realistic performance comparison between them has been attempted. This paper reports on the results of a simulation comparison made by an independent researcher using the ns-2.26[1] simulator for the WSN protocols: Directed Diffusion (DD)[2], Two-Tier Data Dissemination (TTDD) [3] and Gradient Broadcast (GRAB)[4]. Our performance study provides useful insights for the network designer-such as which protocols (and design choices) scale control traffic well, improve data delivery or reduce overall energy consumption. We observe that despite the designers intentions to make these protocols self-configuring, they in fact rely on a number of statically configured parameters which are the cause of the reduction in peformance. For example, the static preconfiguration of the cell size in TTDD. is one of the reasons why TTDD exhibits larger routing overhead than DD by 67.6% on average. Although GRAB produces approximately 93.6% smaller overhead than TTDD and 89.27% smaller than DD, because of statically configured amount credit GRAB delivers on average 6 times more of the redundant data packets than TTDD and DD. We suggest that making these protocols truly self-learning can significantly improve their performance, and comment on how some of these parameters can be dynamically derived through measurements of network and event dynamics.

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