On the Impact of Network Topology on Wireless Sensor Networks Performances: Illustration with Geographic Routing

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are composed of constrained devices and deployed in unattended and hostile environments. Most papers presenting solutions for WSN evaluate their work over random topologies to highlight some of their "good" performances. They rarely study these behaviors over more than one topology. Yet, the topology used can greatly impact the routing performances. This is what we demonstrate in this paper. We present a study of the impact of network topology on algorithms performance in Wireless Sensor Networks and illustrate it with geographic routing. Geographic routing is a family of routing algorithms using nodes coordinates to route data packet from source to destination. We measure the impact of different network topologies from realistic ones to regular and unrealistic ones through extensive simulations. Studied algorithms are common geographic greedy algorithms with different heuristics from the literature. We show that different topologies can lead to a difference of up to 25% on delivery ratio and average route length and more than 100% on overall cost of transmissions.

Constructing Customized Multi-hop Topologies in Dense Wireless Network Testbeds

“…The latter covers many aspects relevant for this paper, including transmission power selection for controlling the density and the selection of quality radio links. For this, a strategic approach is important, because the topology has a large impact on the performance, for example on delivery ratio and energy consumption, as discussed in [8]. Outside the IoT-LAB, channel characterizations were conducted for example in complex factory environments [25] and by evaluating the influence of antenna, mutual alignment and distance on the transmission between wireless sensor nodes [18].…”

Characterizing the Topology of an Urban Wireless Sensor Network for Road Traffic Management

“…They conclude that topology must be taken into consideration for a protocol to be fully evaluated. Ducrocq et al [11] evaluate the impact of network topology on geographic routing. Notably, they show that different topologies can lead to a difference of around 25% on the delivery rate and the average length of a route, and up to 100% on the overall cost of transmission.…”

“…Secondary streets should be monitored to detect small events that can often escalate to blocking situations and provide a fast and appropriate reaction. The huge amount of research in ad-hoc, mesh and sensor networks has shown that the network topology has a strong effect on the network performance, its reliability and its adaptation capacities [8], [9], [10], [11]. Selecting the appropriate set of algorithms and protocols requires a full characterization of the scenario and the network topology.…”

Connectivity analysis of wireless sensor networks deployments in smart cities

“…[12]). However, the topology of the network deployed over a city infrastructure depends on the deployment method and this topology has a strong effect on the network protocols performance at all levels of the communication process [13]. Indeed, the network density has an effect on local congestion and on nodes energy consumption.…”