## 5 Simulation Results and Performance Analyses
### Performance Comparisons  
Figure 13 illustrates the total energy consumption of the proposed CLCQ, as well as QELAR and GEDAR, under varying numbers of nodes. It is evident from the data that, as the number of network nodes increases, the total energy consumption of this protocol and QELAR nodes exhibits a downward trend, while the energy consumption of GEDAR shows a slight increase but remains relatively consistent. Once the number of nodes exceeds 70, the energy consumption advantage of this protocol becomes noticeable. This phenomenon reveals that, as the network size increases, the advantages of this protocol in energy consumption control become more pronounced. In particular, when there are 90 nodes in the network and both \(\varphi_{en1}\) and \(\varphi_{en2}\) are set at 0.1, the energy consumption of this protocol is approximately 16.04% and 17.93% lower than that of QELAR and GEDAR, respectively. This result not only corroborates the efficacy of this protocol in terms of energy conservation but also highlights its performance advantages, especially in large-scale networks. This is because the protocol is designed to consider how to reduce energy consumption by optimizing routing as the network scale expands. As illustrated in Figure 14, the residual energy variance of the CLCQ, QELAR, and GEDAR varies with the number of nodes. The selection mechanism of relay nodes in the GEDAR protocol is primarily dependent on the location information. Consequently, when node locations do not change significantly over a short period, the network tends to follow a fixed transmission path. This results in GEDAR having significantly higher residual energy variance compared to the other two protocols. In contrast, the proposed protocol and QELAR show superior performance in addressing the residual energy variance. As the node count grows, the number of next hop nodes available for selection also increases, thereby providing more routing choices for the protocol. This, in turn, helps to achieve more uniform energy consumption. Consequently, the residual energy variance of the two protocols gradually decreases as the number of nodes increases. Furthermore, as the number of nodes increases, the CLCQ presents a more pronounced advantage in energy balance and achieves superior energy utilization efficiency. This indicates that  
Figure 12: PDR under different \(\varphi_{q}\) and \(\varphi_{t}\) values. the protocol proposed in this paper is capable of more intelligent energy consumption allocation within the network, preventing excessive energy depletion on specific nodes and thereby enhancing the overall energy utilization efficiency of the network. Figure 15 depicts the average end-to-end delay of the CLCQ under varying numbers of nodes, with comparisons made to QELAR and GEDAR. It can be observed that the average end-to-end delay of all protocols decreases as the number of nodes increases. This is because an increase in node density allows the network to identify a path with fewer hops between the source and destination nodes, thereby reducing delay. Furthermore, GEDAR does not consider the issue of congestion, resulting in a significantly longer end-to-end delay than the other two protocols. In the case of a small number of nodes, the average end-to-end delay of QELAR is observed to be shorter than that of the CLCQ. Nevertheless, as the number of nodes increases, the delay gap between the CLCQ and the QELAR protocol begins to narrow. Once the network reaches a certain scale, the CLCQ exhibits a lower average end-to-end delay than QELAR. This indicates that, as the network scale expands, the CLCQ exhibits enhanced adaptability and superiority in addressing congestion, selecting routing, and optimizing data transmission paths. The advantage of the  
Figure 14: Residual energy variance of different protocols. Figure 13: Total energy consumption of different protocols. CLCQ is that it fully considers the channel quality of the physical layer and the congestion of the data link layer in the protocol design.