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

Recently, multipath routing in wireless sensor networks (WSN) has got immense research interest due to its capability of providing increased robustness, reliability, throughput, and security. However, a theoretical 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 network model, and two energy consumption schemes for sensor nodes, namely, periodic listening and selective wake-up schemes. It exploits the influence of node density, link failure rates, number of multiple paths, and transmission environment on the energy consumption. Scaling laws of energy-tax due to routing and data traffic 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 depicted for a reference network via numerical results.