Impact of route length on the performance of routing and flow admission control algorithms in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

In this study, the impact of route length on the performance of a routing protocol and flow admission control is analysed. First, the authors present an end-to-end available-bandwidth-based proactive routing protocol for ad-hoc wireless sensor networks. The routing protocol maintains the best data forwarding path in terms of the end-to-end available bandwidth. Second, to determine the impact of route length on a routing protocol's performance, they modify the routing protocol. The modified available-bandwidth-based protocol trades-off the end-to-end available bandwidth against the route length. Third, they integrate a state-of-the-art flow admission control algorithm with the proposed protocols and a shortest hop-count-based protocol. Through simulations they evaluate the following: (i) performance of the proposed protocols and a state-of-the-art available-bandwidth-based opportunistic protocol and (ii) the effectiveness of a state-of-the-art flow admission control algorithm over proposed protocols and a shortest hop-count-based protocol. The simulation results demonstrate the following drawbacks of not considering the hop-count metric: longer data forwarding paths, higher number of retransmissions, and reduced effectiveness of the admission control algorithm. The modified available-bandwidth-based proactive protocol provides the best overall performance. Therefore, using their results they conclude that route length impacts the performance of routing and flow admission control algorithms, but is not a singularly decisive factor.