Performance sensitivity of routing algorithms with various models of wireless sensor networks

Routing algorithms for wireless sensor networks are often evaluated through simulations in order to measure the lifetime of the network and the efficiency of the algorithm regarding energy consumption. Some particular communication models with their parameters´ set are used to implement the simulation and are rarely identical. We exhibit two kinds of performance sensitivity regarding simulations: the first one concerns the communication model itself and the second one is generated by the parameters of the communication model. We provide a generalized model that covers very different situations and we state the routing problem as a linear programming problem in order to measure the absolute efficiency of the algorithms with different models and parameter values. Our experiments run using two routing protocols, LEACH and Flow Augmentation, showed that different models or parameters can lead to significantly different results and conclusions. We tried to characterize the origin of the performance sensitivity in each case.