A framework for empirical evaluation of nature inspired routing protocols for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

The major contribution of the work presented in this paper is a comprehensive performance evaluation framework for conducting an unbiased evaluation of routing protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). The framework is primarily designed for agent based Nature inspired routing protocols but is general enough to be used for evaluation of classical WSN routing protocols as well. The other important contribution of the work is implementation of two state-of-the- art routing protocols, EEABR and BeeSensor, in a well known WSN simulator RMASE and their thorough comparative analysis, using our proposed framework, with one another and with Flooded Piggybacked Ant Routing (FP-Ant) and a well known classical routing protocol, Ad-hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV). To the best of our knowledge, Nature inspired WSN routing protocols have never been evaluated in such an extensive manner either with one another or with AODV. The results obtained from the simulations, using the framework, have given us the opportunity to report new behavioral patterns of the protocols that were never previously reported. We expect that the proposed framework can act as a significant evaluation tool that protocol designers can utilize to identify serious shortcomings in their protocols and rectify them at an earlier protocol engineering cycle.