Evaluation of a proposed minimum path impotence routing policy in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Routing in wireless sensor networks is a challenging task due to the energy hole problem, which negatively affects the network’s operation. Taking into account path impotence, i.e., a metric based on the transmission distance and the energy left at the nodes’ batteries, an adjustable routing policy is proposed here that allows nodes to choose different parent nodes for forwarding their data packets toward the sink node. A major difference from the conventional approaches is that path impotence is determined by the most impotent node, instead of adding up the metric along the path. Due to this difference, the proposed policy propagates path impotence values throughout the network efficiently, with reduced extra control messages (e.g., no need to continuously reconstruct routing trees). The number of messages sent by the particular policy (i.e., overhead) is analytically investigated here and, in addition, it is analytically shown that no deadlocks are possible. Simulation results are used for evaluating the proposed policy against other eight similar policies that appear in the literature. It is demonstrated that when the introduced overhead is taken into account (e.g., energy is consumed when transmitting messages similarly to data packet transmissions), the proposed policy outperforms the other policies under certain conditions, related to the size of the message compared to the size of data packets.