Research on routing protocols in wireless sensor network for bridge health monitoring

Wireless sensor network (WSN) applied on bridge health monitoring has attracted considerable attention for its advantages such as self-organization, micro-structure, low cost and high flexibility. The performances of WSNs are extremely correlated with application scenarios and even the same protocol may results in an obvious performance difference on various applications. However, no one has studied the performance of the existing protocols applied to bridge health monitoring systems. In this paper, we mainly compare the performance of three most commonly used routing protocols, AODV, DSDV and DSR. The scenarios simulated by NS2 are designed with nine fixed nodes. According to WSN structure of bridge monitoring systems, the nodes are statically deployed in nearly a line. Packet loss rate, average end_to_end delay, routing overheads and throughput are considered as evaluation criteria. In the light of simulation results, DSR has the best performance among the three protocols in the bridge health monitoring systems, a kind of linear static WSN.