Performance evaluation of routing protocols in Zigbee network: DSR vs AODV

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are becoming popular now among network experts and researchers because of increasing demand in WSN applications in the field of sensor networks. Also, the research in routing protocols of WSN has grown tremendously to make sure that WSN applications in WSN is performing at its full potential. This paper focuses on analyzing the performance evaluation of routing protocols in Zigbee network (a form of WSN), particularly DSR and AODV routing protocols in Zigbee network. Zigbee has become a widely used application with different routing protocol options in the Personal Area Network (PAN), Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) and in Internet of Things (IoT) applications due to its ease of use and accessibility. The metrics that are used to analyze the performance of these routing protocols are the throughput, delay and the number of packets received. The simulation results using eight nodes showed that AODV routing protocol is more efficient network to be applied in Zigbee when compared to DSR routing protocol as it recorded a higher number of packets received, throughput and lower delay than DSR. Overall, the findings are found to be consistent with previous studies and proved that AODV is the preferred routing protocol for Zigbee networks.