Building Blocks of Energy and Cost Efficient Wireless Sensor Networks

摘要

Wireless sensor networks are limited by their energy source. The energy optimisation schemes introduced to date adapt routing techniques to achieve lower energy consumption. Little consideration is given to the underlying routing protocol itself and its energy consumption properties. This paper presents a series of simulations of wireless routing protocols and their energy consumption-related properties. We use simulations in ad-hoc networking environment to extract generic properties of wireless networks and their behaviour in different circumstances. We find that the energy consumed by the routing overhead is not indicative of the overall energy efficiency performance. We further show that two protocols can have the same energy efficiency, yet result in a considerably different network lifetimes. Topology information is shown to be very important and the protocols that operate in promiscuous mode are better equipped to handle heavy traffic loads.