Systematic Experimental Analysis and Evaluation of Routing Protocol in Wireless Sensor Networks

The use of multihop routing protocols in wireless sensor network (WSNs) is common, as sensor nodes are usually deployed across a geographical area with minimal transmission range to conserve energy. However, existing routing protocols cannot tolerate multiple failures, for example, NST-AODV performs well in sporadic and temporal link failure but cannot cope with longer periodic failure. In this paper, we present a novel Multi-modal Routing Protocol (MRP) which address these issues, and validate its performance against two existing reactive routing protocols in both simulated and testbed environments. We propose the use of a systematic experimental analysis and evaluation technique to produce results with an acceptable level of confidence and improve the credibility of our experiments. The main contributions of this paper are (1) to evaluate whether the previous simulated results are valid in a real hardware, (2) the application of statistical evaluation techniques to ensure the results are both scientifically and statistically significant. Both experimental and simulation approaches have produced credible performance improvement in term packet delivery for MRP and yielded a lower routing control overhead than AODV and NST-AODV.