Threshold-related throughput – A new criterion for evaluation of sensor network performance

Energy efficient and power aware protocols are of utmost importance in Sensor Networks. The most popular criteria so far, for evaluating performance of energy-aware protocols are lifetime and throughput. One of the main contributions of the present paper is to show that very often those criteria provide insufficient indications of the algorithm performance. Here we propose a new criterion, named threshold-related throughput, which provides a much better measure of the algorithm performance. The other main contribution of the paper is an extensive investigation of a large variety of routing protocols and routing cost metrics, activated on a variety of Sensor Network topologies, configurations and initial energy patterns. The work studies the performance of these protocols and compares them using the new criterion. In addition, we present results of an extensive investigation of performance of several configurations, heterogeneous and hierarchical, of networks with two types of devices.