## 4 Performance Analysis and Discussion  
The efficiency of the secure routing protocol with energy optimization and data storage was evaluated with several simulation experiments with randomly varying topology. NS-2 version 2.34 was the simulation tool used and considered a multi-hop network with 1000 m \(\times\) 1000 m size located in a randomized grid with SNs from 50 to 200. The sink node was at the centre of the network. Traffic was CBR of 600 packets/sec and packet size was 316 bytes. The heterogeneity of the network was proven in the simulation by testing the environment with different sets of nodes. The simulation parameters are shown in Table 1.  
The performance measures considered were throughput, end-to-end delay, energy efficiency, the lifetime of the network and data storage capacity. End-to-end delay, an important metric, is considered to deal with real-time traffic and transmit data packets within the stipulated time. End-to-end delay is the difference in the time taken between the source node transmitting data and the sink receiving it. It is the sum of the delay in transmission, propagation, queuing and processing at every hop. Table 2 shows a comparison of the end-end delay. Figure 3 depicts the end-end delay for the proposed MLRP-HTEEN-UDSP protocol and Figure 4 compares it with the other \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c} \hline \hline
**Parameters** & **Value** \\ \hline Network size & 1000 m \(\times\) 1000 m \\ Sensor nodes & 200 \\ Transmission Rate & 50 to 250 Kbps \\ Number of Nodes & 10 to 500 \\ Data Flows & 2 to 10 \\ MAC Protocol & IEEE 802.11 \\ Initial Energy & 14.0 Joules \\ Packet Size & 512 bytes \\ Receiving Power & 0.4 Watts \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 1: Simulation parameters. Figure 5 depicts the throughput of MLRP-HTEEN-UDSP, while Figure 6 compares the throughput of the proposed protocol with other protocols. The selection of multiple paths and minimum delay balances the load and uses the wireless spectrum efficiently. Thus, it achieves a higher throughput than other protocols. Table 4 shows a comparison of the energy efficiency. The average energy efficiency is represented in Figure 7 where we can realize that our proposed protocol MLRP-HTEEN-UDSP has less energy dissipation compared with other protocols (LEACH, CCBRP and PEGASIS) as shown in Figure 8 with various node numbers. \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c c c c c c} \hline \hline
**Network** & **LEACH** & **CCBRP** & **PEGASIS** & **NCBPR** & **HHCA** & **ETHLCM** & **MLRP-HTEEN-UDSP** \\ \hline
50 & 20 & 28 & 30 & 35 & 40 & 45 & 52 \\
75 & 34 & 36 & 40 & 44 & 52 & 55 & 61 \\
100 & 43 & 47 & 50 & 52 & 63 & 65 & 78 \\
125 & 58 & 62 & 66 & 69 & 74 & 79 & 82 \\
150 & 63 & 68 & 70 & 72 & 76 & 80 & 85 \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 3: Comparison of throughput. Figure 5: Throughput of MLRP-HTEEN-UDSP. Figure 6: Comparison of throughput. Table 5 shows the comparison of the network lifetime. Figure 9 presents the network lifetime for the proposed MLRP-HTEEN-UDSP and Figure 10 shows a comparison of the network lifetime between the proposed and existing techniques. \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c c c c c c} \hline \hline
**Network Size** & **LEACH** & **CCBRP** & **PEGASIS** & **NCBPR** & **HHCA** & **ETLHOM** & **MLRP-HTEEN-UDSP** \\ \hline
50 & 20 & 23 & 25 & 28 & 32 & 38 & 44 \\
75 & 35 & 38 & 40 & 42 & 46 & 50 & 51 \\
100 & 38 & 40 & 43 & 45 & 51 & 58 & 61 \\
125 & 50 & 53 & 55 & 59 & 63 & 69 & 72 \\
150 & 52 & 58 & 60 & 62 & 68 & 70 & 75 \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 4: Comparison of energy efficiency. Figure 8: Comparison of energy efficiency. Figure 7: Energy efficiency of MLRP-HTEEN-UDSP. Table 6 shows the comparison of data storage. Figure 11 shows the data storage for the proposed MLRP-HTEEN-UDSP and Figure 12 shows the comparison of the data storage between the proposed and existing techniques.