A Study on Achievable Rates for Source-Destination Pair in Wireless Sensor Networks

As wireless sensor networks (WSN) become the wave of the future, the performance capability of these networks has become a recent hot topic. Unfortunately, a theoretic capacity for WSN is unknown in general up to the present. In this paper, we look at the achievable rates of WSN. The optimal rates can be found by an exhaustive search through every possible route in the network. This proves to be extremely time-consuming and computationally expensive and is impractical to implement in real world applications. We propose a greedy algorithm to route information from source to destination node-a much less expensive alternative to an exhaustive search. Simulation results show that for a restrictive grid topology, the rate achieved by the greedy algorithm reach 95% of the optimal rates. However, for a less restrictive topology, where nodes can have random locations, the performance of the greedy algorithm quickly becomes inadequate.