In recent years, much attention has been given to wireless sensor networks (WSNs) research, due to the growth in Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems technology. IEEE 802.15.4 is starting to emerge as the next generation wireless standard for low-rate wireless personal area networks. Zigbee is a standard that builds upon IEEE 802.15.4 and offers low power, low data rate, and short range networking for wireless battery powered devices. The Ad hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV) routing protocol enables the routing of data between a source and destination in mesh networks. The Dynamic MANET On-demand routing protocol (DYMO) is a successor to AODV that was designed for wireless ad-hoc networks. In this paper, we present a performance comparison of AODV and DYMO based on the Zigbee standard. The performance comparison is based on the following metrics: packet delivery ratio, end-to-end delay, and energy consumption. Our work was implemented for realistic node densities and simulation times in non-beacon enabled Zigbee networks. Our simulations show that the performance of the protocols depend on the network topology. The results obtained indicate that DYMO outperforms AODV with respect to packet delivery ratio (PDR) and energy consumption.