## 6 Simulation Results and Discussion
### Performance Trade-Offs Made by the Routing Protocols Being Analyzed  
In this section, we discuss the achievements of the proposed protocols and mention the price at which these achievements are made. The proposed protocols are compared to the already designed protocols Co-CESat and InCo-CESat. Performance tradeoffs between compared protocols are also shown in Table 7. As discussed earlier, Co-CESat utilizes the normal cooperation approach in which data are sent to the destination through all of the possible relaying paths regardless of the channel conditions. Normal source nodes send sensed data to the sink through two advanced nodes. In this way, the burden on advanced nodes increases as they always have to send forwarded data along with their own data. Co-CESat achieves high throughput due to the possibility of the reception of multiple copies of the same data at the sink. Along with the direct link, the availability of two more paths increases the number of received packets at the sink. However, Co-CESat consumes extra energy of the overall network by transmitting multiple copies of the data through different paths without any need. Therefore, the high throughput of Co-CESat is achieved at the cost of high energy consumption, as shown in Figures 6 and 9.  
To reduce the energy consumption of Co-CESat, the incremental cooperation approach is utilized in InCo-CESat and EInCo-CESat. Incremental relaying in InCo-CESat exploits a short feedback message from the destination to the source node. The cooperation among nodes process is adaptable to channel conditions. In this type of cooperation, nodes broadcast data to the destination and relay nodes. Relays are responsible for forwarding that data only when the destination sends a NACK to the source node, informing of the failure of the reception of the data packet. Two relay nodes are available for each normal node. The advantage of incremental cooperation is that the second relay forwards the stored data only when the first relay fails to transmit the data successfully. This strategy considerably reduces the overall energy of the network by reducing the extra energy consumption of relay nodes in needless relaying. This reduction in energy consumption is achieved at the cost of a greater number of retransmissions and extra processing in utilizing the short feedback message in the form of ACK/NACK. It is shown in Figure 9 that at some particular time, Co-CESat has a greater number of packets than InCo-CESat and EInCo-CESat.  
In the case when the direct link fails, InCo-CESat utilizes two more retransmissions; whereas, EInCo-CESat utilizes three more retransmissions when the direct link between the source and destination nodes fails. EInCo-CESat also utilizes a third relaying path for the normal nodes' data transmission. This path is only utilized if the first two relays fail to transmit data successfully. Therefore, EInCo-CESat achieves higher throughput than InCo-CESat at the cost of the extra energy consumption of the third relay, which can be seen in the simulation results. The low PER of EInCo-CESat is achieved at the cost of low energy efficiency. This is analysed through the simulation plots. However, InCo-CESat achieves a greater stability period than EInCo-CESat due to the lesser energy consumption in the relaying process than that of EInCo-CESat and Co-CESat, as shown in Figure 8.