Evaluation of the Power Consumption of Routing Protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks

Sensor networks are one of the fastest growing areas in broad wireless ad hoc networking field. A sensor node, typically, contains signal-processing circuits, micro-controllers and a wireless transmitter/receiver antenna. Energy saving is one of the critical issue for sensor networks since most sensors are equipped with non-rechargeable batteries that have limited lifetime. Routing schemes are used to transfer data collected by sensor nodes to base stations. In the literature many routing protocols for wireless sensor networks are suggested. In this work, four routing protocols for wireless sensor networks viz. flooding, gossiping, GBR and LEACH have been simulated using TinyOS and their power consumption is studied using PowerTOSSIM. A realization of these protocols has been carried out using Mica2 Motes.