Performance evaluation of routing schemes for energy-constrained delay/fault-tolerant mobile sensor network

In order to provide communication services in delay/fault-tolerant mobile sensor network (DFT-MSNs) for pervasive information gathering where it lacks end-to-end paths between the sensor sources and information sink, a variety of forwarding and routing schemes have been proposed. Consequently, it is significant to accurately evaluate the performance to show their advantages and inferiority. At the same time, energy is very limited, and is a serious problem in DFT-MSNs in practice, and it impacts the system performance significantly. However, current existing works of routing performance evaluation ignore the influence of the energy constraint. In this study, the authors investigate the performance of routing schemes for the energy-constrained DFT-MSNs. First, the authors model the two-hop relaying, epidemic routing and K-hop forwarding with energy constraint based on a continuous-time Markov chain. Then, the authors obtain the system performance of message delivery delay and delivery cost by explicit expressions. By both simulation and numerical evaluation, the authors demonstrate the accuracy of the proposed model and reveal that the energy constraint avoids the message storms efficiently which are harmful to the systems in term of delivery cost and transmission contention.