Performance evaluation for Geographical and Energy Aware Routing protocol

Geographic and Energy Aware Routing (GEAR) protocol uses energy aware neighbor selection to route a packet towards the target region and geographic forwarding or flooding approaches to disseminate the packet inside the destination region. The objective of this protocol is to fairly balance the energy among neighbor nodes. However, being distance aware by the geographic routing or energy aware creates conflicting goals such as obtaining minimal delay, increasing energy balancing and increasing system delivery ratio. Towards this end, this paper evaluates the performance of GEAR protocol and investigates the possibility to optimize its operation to achieve greatest performance. A prototype of a simulator is implemented using Java. A performance evaluation is performed and demonstrated on several scenarios using different values of preference weight for distance and energy balancing in each node´s routing decision. This includes static centralized strategy, dynamic and adaptive de-centralized strategies. Results show that best performance is achievable at different operation points in all strategies.