Energy consumption analysis of geographic routing in WSNs with location error

Abstract:
Geographic routing is an attractive option for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) because of its low overhead and energy expenditure, but it is based on assumptions of accurate knowledge of location. Positioning systems are inevitably imprecise because of inexact measurements. Location errors lead to poor performance of geographic routing in terms of packet delivery ratio, but little attention has been given to the effect on power consumption. This paper presents a study of energy consumption in WSNs which make use of geographic routing by investigating scenarios that incorporate localization inaccuracies. As previous work makes use of simplistic random uniform error models, the present work considers a normally distributed position error. The routing behavior is evaluated for a variation of the standard deviation of position error between 10-30 percent of the considered radio range. It is found that when there is location error, more energy consumption is spent per dropped packets because of increased numbers and received packets have increased energy expense due to the length of routes. Also, investigations shed light on the percentage of failures and the consequent energy consumption due to loss of connectivity, lack of forwarding options with progress, traffic congestion and location error. It is concluded that resilience to location error is imperative, but attention to node placement is also necessary. Keywords: location error, erroneus localization, geographic routing, energy consumption, energy efficiency, wireless sensor networks