Evaluation of a transmission count-efficient metric for energy-aware routing in WSNs

We evaluate a routing metric, called TXPFI, which captures the expected number of frame transmissions needed for successful delivery of data in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) featuring non-fully cooperative nodes and unreliable links. The study, which addresses the exploitation of the TXPFI in routing protocols of distance-vector type, assesses the impact of different network settings on the performance of the metric, compares the TXPFI with a number of routing metrics derived from the composition of primary metrics commonly used in routing protocols for WSNs, and evaluates the distribution of the transmission load to network nodes. The simulation results show that the TXPFI exhibits consistent behavior for different network parameters, outperforms the other composite metrics included in the study in terms of the overall number of transmitted frames and performs reasonably well regarding the maximum transmission load placed on the network nodes.