A novel approach of WSN routing protocols comparison for forest fire detection

Wireless sensor networks represent a promising solution for forest fire detection. Yet, these networks are composed of constrained elements and their operation must be optimized to reach a satisfying performance in terms of response time, fault tolerance and network lifetime. Studies have been made in this direction but they have studied only some of the aforementioned constraints and have not discussed the influence of the encountered situations after network deployment. The aim of this paper is to propose a comparison approach of fault tolerant routing protocols for the forest fire detection application which studies the network lifetime and network response time to an event taking into account the specificities of the different cases encountered in the field. To test this approach, the fault-tolerant routing protocols Multilevel, Heterogeneous Disjoint Multipath Routing Protocol (HDMRP) and Enhanced Ant-based QoS-aware routing protocol for Heterogeneous wireless Sensor Networks (EAQHSeN) are implemented and tested in the Castalia WSNs simulator. Simulations results showed that the three protocols have a very comparable network lifetime with a slight advantage in favor of the HDMRP and EAQHSeN protocols. On the other hand, HDMRP and EAQHSeN present a network response time respectively twice and approximately trice more preforming than that of multilevel.