Analysis of energy-tax for multipath routing in wireless sensor networks

Abstract Recently, multipath routing in wireless sen-sor networks (WSN) has got immense research interest due to its capability of providing increased robustness, reliability, throughput, and security. However, a the-oretical analysis on the energy consumption behavior of multipath routing has not yet been studied. In this paper, we present a general framework for analyzing the energy consumption overhead (i.e., energy tax) resulting from multipath routing protocol in WSN. The framework includes a baseline routing model, a net-work model, and two energy consumption schemes for sensor nodes, namely, periodic listening and selective wake-up schemes. It exploits the influence of node den-sity, link failure rates, number of multiple paths, and transmission environment on the energy consumption. Scaling laws of energy-tax due to routing and data traf-fic are derived through analysis, which provide energy profiles of single-path and multipath routing and serve as a guideline for designing energy-efficient protocols for WSN. The crossover points of relative energy taxes, paid by single-path and multipath routing, reception, and transmission, are obtained. Finally, the scaling laws are validated and performance comparisons are de-picted for a reference network via numerical results