Performance of GPSR and AOMDV in WSNs with Uncontrolled Mobility

Emergence and evolution of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) opened the door for the development of many applications. Mobile Wireless Sensors Networks (MWSNs) is a subclass of WSNs in which some or all sensors are mobile. Although such mobility has benefits for extending network coverage, the existence of nodes mobility imposes challenges in the data delivery process as connectivity changes dynamically. This issue is exacerbated when nodes move in uncontrollable manner, e.g. mounted on helmets of factory workers or on vehicles. Existing WSNs routing protocols are mainly designed to support static or semi-dynamic scenarios. Due to the similarity between MWSNs and Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs), existing MANET routing protocols can be used for this purpose. In this paper, we use ns2 to evaluate the performance of two MANET routing protocols, GPSR and AOMDV, in the field of MWSNs with a location-based sensing application assuming the nodes move in an uncontrollable manner. We use metrics such as packet delivery ratio, routing overhead, hop count, and energy consumption to test protocols performance. We also use a utility function to estimate the performance of the application. We find that the geographic-based routing, GPSR, works better than AOMDV due to its lower routing protocol overhead.