Impact of route length on the performance of routing and flow admission control algorithms in wireless sensor networks

In this study, the impact of route length on the performance of a routing protocol and flow admission control is analysed. First, the authors present an end-to-end available-bandwidth-based proactive routing protocol for ad-hoc wireless sensor networks. The routing protocol maintains the best data forwarding path in terms of the end-to-end available bandwidth. Second, to determine the impact of route length on a routing protocol's performance, they modify the routing protocol. The modified available-bandwidth-based protocol trades-off the end-to-end available bandwidth against the route length. Third, they integrate a state-of-the-art flow admission control algorithm with the proposed protocols and a shortest hop-count-based protocol. Through simulations they evaluate the following: (i) performance of the proposed protocols and a state-of-the-art available-bandwidth-based opportunistic protocol and (ii) the effectiveness of a state-of-the-art flow admission control algorithm over proposed protocols and a shortest hop-count-based protocol. The simulation results demonstrate the following drawbacks of not considering the hop-count metric: longer data forwarding paths, higher number of retransmissions, and reduced effectiveness of the admission control algorithm. The modified available-bandwidth-based proactive protocol provides the best overall performance. Therefore, using their results they conclude that route length impacts the performance of routing and flow admission control algorithms, but is not a singularly decisive factor.