Impact of variable transmission power on routing protocols in wireless sensor networks

A wireless sensor network is composed of randomly dispersed nodes capable of collecting and transmitting physical data to a central node. Communication protocols are responsible for maintaining the routs in the network as well as for ensuring reliable inter-node communication. The main focus of this work is to analyze the performance of both reactive routing protocols mainly Ad hoc On Demand Distance Vector protocol (AODV) and Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) protocol. We also present the analysis of different scenarios concerning the proactive protocol, Destination-Sequenced Distance Vector (DSDV). In this paper, we study the impact of variable transmission power allocated for each sensor node on the performance of the listed communication protocols. We carry out simulation with NS-2 network simulator. Evaluation parameters concern energy consumption of the network, packet delivery fraction, end-to-end delay, throughput and packet lost. A notable impact of variable transmission power on energy saving is detected.