The Impact of Deployment Pattern and Routing Scheme on the Lifetime in Multi-Sink Wireless Sensor Network

Abstract

Extensive use of sensor and actuator networks in many real-life applications introduced several new performance metrics at the node and network level. Since wireless sensor nodes have significant battery constraints, therefore, energy efficiency, as well as network lifetime, are among the most significant performance metrics to measure the effectiveness of given network architecture. This work investigates the performance of an event-based data delivery model using a multipath routing scheme for a wireless sensor network with multiple sink nodes. This routing algorithm follows a sink initiated route discovery process with the location information of the source nodes already known to the sink nodes. It also considers communication link costs before making decisions for packet forwarding. Carried out simulation compares the network performance of a wireless sensor network with a single sink, dual sink, and multi sink networking approaches. Based on a series of simulation experiments, the lifetime aware multipath routing approach is found appropriate for increasing the lifetime of sensor nodes significantly when compared to other similar routing schemes. However, energy-efficient packet forwarding is a major concern of this work; other network performance metrics like delay, average packet latency, and packet delivery ratio are also taken into the account.