The tradeoffs between data delivery ratio and energy costs in wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor network (WSN) routing protocols, e.g., the Collection Tree Protocol (CTP), are designed to adapt in an ad-hoc fashion to the quality of the environment. WSNs thus have high internal dynamics and complex global behavior. Classical techniques for performance evaluation (such as testing or verification) fail to uncover the cases of extreme behavior which are most interesting to designers. We contribute a practical framework for performance evaluation of WSN protocols. The framework is based on multi-objective optimization, coupled with protocol simulation and evaluation of performance factors. For evaluation, we consider the two crucial functional and non-functional performance factors of a WSN, respectively: the ratio of data delivery from the network (DDR), and the total energy expenditure of the network (COST). We are able to discover network topological configurations over which CTP has unexpectedly low DDR and/or high COST performance, and expose full Pareto fronts which show what the possible performance tradeoffs for CTP are in terms of these two performance factors. Eventually, Pareto fronts allow us to bound the state space of the WSN, a fact which provides essential knowledge to WSN protocol designers.