Performance evaluation of lifetime-aware routing in Wireless Sensor Networks with practical design considerations

Energy resource management is considered essential in battery-operated Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Radio communication circuitry is a significant power consumer in a WSN. Therefore, it is desired to design an efficient routing algorithm which conserves the battery power as much as possible, resulting in a longer network lifetime. Lifetime-aware routing protocols were suggested to distribute the flow of information through different routes. These works were mainly based on simplified assumptions which ignored practical considerations and assumed perfect knowledge of the channel conditions and the ability to adjust the transmission power accordingly. In this work, the practical case of a constant transmission level is applied to the Flow Augmentation algorithm and the lifetime performance of the proposed modified Flow Augmentation algorithm called Constant Transmission Power Flow Augmentation (CTPFA) is evaluated and compared with the original Flow Augmentation. The CTPFA analysis proves that lifetime of a WSN with nodes that have constant transmission power decreases significantly due to the excess transmission power used. Methods to improve the lifetime performance are discussed.