On the impact of network topology on wireless sensor networks performances: Illustration with geographic routing

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are composed of constrained devices and deployed in unattended and hostile environments. Most papers presenting solutions for WSN evaluate their work over random topologies to highlight some of their 'good' performances. They rarely study these behaviors over more than one topology. Yet, the topology used can greatly impact the routing performances. This is what we demonstrate in this paper. We present a study of the impact of the network topology on algorithm performance in WSNs and illustrate it with the geographic routing. Geographic routing relies on node coordinates to route data packets from source to destination. We measure the impact of different network topologies from realistic ones to regular and very popular ones through extensive simulation and experimentation campaigns. We show that different topologies can lead to a difference of up to 25% on delivery ratio and average route length and more than 100% on energy costs. © 2014 IEEE.