Performance Comparison of Source Routing Tactics for WSN of Grid Topology

The nodes near sink in wireless sensor networks are featured with heavy transmission loads, so these performance bottleneck nodes are prone to running out of energy early with shortened network lifetime. Routing tactic plays important role on transmission performance and energy consumption of network. In this paper, we enumerate typical source routing tactics in Grid topology, include 1) Random Equal Probability Forwarding, 2) Line Forwarding, 3) Source-Zigzag Forwarding, 4) Destination-Zigzag Forwarding, and 5) Balance Forwarding. We analysis the traffic load distribution among nodes for these routing tactics, and calculate the load of performance bottleneck nodes and transmission delay in one data collection cycle. Based on the energy consumption model, we further make comparison on the energy consumptions of transmission and standing-by for these tactics. Numerical results show that Balance Forwarding tactic leads to the least overall energy consumption on performance bottleneck nodes, and Line Forwarding and Random Equal-Probability Forwarding lead to high energy consumption.