ABSTRACT Wireless sensor network (WSN) with several sensors is used to group measurements of certain physical quantities or environmental conditions, including sound, temperature, pressure, vibration, motion, or pollution, at various locations and ranges. In WSNs, several protocols address the issue of routing. Sensor nodes in WSN usually have limited energy resources and storage capacities. Therefore, the issue of energy usage in sensors and protocols is very important. This paper analyzes and compares the quality of service (QoS) performances of three important routing protocols of the mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) including Ad-hoc on-demand distance vector (AODV), dynamic source routing (DSR), and destination sequenced distance vector (DSDV), in a smart building case study. The QoS evaluation metrics include residual energy of nodes, instant throughput (IT), average throughput (AT), packet delivery ratio (PDR), packet loss ratio (PLR), and route discovery latency (RDL) based on IEEE 802.15.4 MAC protocol standard. The simulation is carried out using NS2, and the WSN has 16 fixed and 4 mobility nodes with different speeds and paths. The simulation results illustrate that average throughput in AODV is 1.985118 (kbps), however, the figures for DSR and DSDV are 1.977780 and 1.720700 (kbps), respectively. PDR, also, in DSR stands at 1.0, but the figures for AODV and DSDV are lower with the range of 0.999572 and 0.997930, respectively. Overall, The DSR protocol provides a better performance compared to AODV and DSDV routing protocols in terms of PLR and PDR. Also, AODV has better efficiency in RDL and AT compared to other assumed protocols.