IJRET: International Journal of Research in Engineering and Technology eISSN: 2319-1163 | pISSN: 2321-7308 __________________________________________________________________________________________ Volume: 02 Issue: 09 | Sep-2013, Available @ http://www.ijret.org 272 PERFORMANCE COMPARISON OF QoS BASED ROUTING PROTOCOLS MBRR, REAR AND SPEED FOR WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS Deepak Verma 1 , Amardeep Kaur 2 1 M.Tech (C.S.E.), Student, 2 Assistant Professor (C.S.E.), Punjabi University Regional Center for Information Technology and Management, Mohali, Punjab, India Abstract A wireless sensor network (WSN) is a collection of small randomly dispersed micro sensor nodes that have capability to sense, establish wireless communication between each other and do computations and process operations. A network especially wireless network strongly depends on the routing protocols to route the sensed data to the Base Station (BS) via some intermediate nodes. Due to fast emergence of the wireless sensing, a lot of work has been done on the various categories of routing protocols of WSN like location-based, data-centric, hierarchal routing protocols etc. to measure the network performance. But recent studies are provided with the evidence that Quality-of-Service (QoS) routing can enhance the network performance by increasing the network utilization, compared to routing that is not sensitive to QoS requirements of traffic. So in this paper, the focus is on evaluation and comparison of the network performance in the WSN having QoS routing. The comparison of the three QoS routing protocols MBRR (Majority Based Re-Routing), REAR (Reliable Energy Aware Routing) and SPEED (Stateless Protocol for End-to-End Delay) on the basis of various performance metrics such as Bit Error Rate (BER) vs. Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR), Average End-to-End Delay vs. BER, Packet Delivery Ratio vs. BER, Energy Consumed vs. BER, Network Lifetime vs. Energy Consumption, Throughput vs. BER and Throughput vs. SNR has been done in this research paper. On the basis of observed simulation results, it is concluded that the performance of MBRR is better than the performance of other two comparing protocols i.e. REAR and SPEED. Index Terms: Wireless Sensor Networks, Routing Protocols, QoS Routing, and Performance Evaluation etc. ----------------------------------------------------------------------***------------------------------------------------------------------------ 1. INTRODUCTION Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have recently drawn significant research attention due to its wide range of applications that may not need human supervision. A Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) is a set of hundreds or thousands of micro sensor nodes that provide the ability to sense and store the physical and the environmental conditions, often in real time, such as temperature, pressure,, light and humidity [1]. Each node is connected to one or several sensors. The size of these sensor nodes is very small. Sensor networks have a wide variety of applications that depends on the variation of requirements and characteristics. The sensor networks can be used in a vast variety of fields like military environment, disaster management, habitat monitoring, medical and health care etc. [2]. Power constraints, limited hardware, decreased reliability, and a typically higher density and number of failure nodes are few of the problems that have to be considered while developing the protocols for use in sensor networks [3]. Due to fast emergence of the wireless sensing, a lot of work has been done on the various categories of routing protocols of WSN like location-based, data-centric, hierarchal routing protocols etc to measure the network performance. But recent studies are provided with the evidence that Quality-of-Service (QoS) routing can enhance the network performance by increasing the network utilization, compared to routing that is not sensitive to QoS requirements of traffic. So the primary focus here is on evaluating and comparing the network performance in the WSN having QoS routing. QoS routing is the process of the selection of the path to be used by the flow of packets, based on its QoS requirements, e.g., bandwidth, throughput etc. In QoS based routing, the protocols provide different priorities to different applications, users, or data flows, or to guarantee a certain level of performance to a data flow [4]. There are so many routing protocols in the QoS-based routing protocols like SAR (Sequential Assignment Routing) [4], SPEED (Stateless Protocol for End-to-End Delay) [7], MMSPEED (Multipath Multi SPEED) [4], Energy-aware routing protocol [4], TBRR (A Tree-Based Reliable Routing Protocol) [8], REAR (Reliable Energy Aware Routing) [6], MBRR (Majority Based Re-Routing) [5], PISA(Priority-based path Selection Algorithm) [5] [8], PISA-III [5] [8], SBRR (Score Based Reliable Routing) [5] [8] etc. The main QoS-based routing protocols that are under consideration in this paper are MBRR, REAR and SPEED as discussed in the following section.