A Comparison of Lifetime-Efficient Forwarding Strategies
for Wireless Sensor Networks
Marcel Busse, Thomas Haenselmann, and Wolfgang Effelsberg
Computer Science IV, University of Mannheim
Seminargebäude A5, D-68159 Mannheim, Germany
{busse, haenselmann, effelsberg}@informatik.uni-mannheim.de
ABSTRACT
As shown in previous work, energy-efficient forwarding is a very
promising forwarding strategy since it trades off the delivery rate
of nodes sending data to a sink node and the required energy in
the network very well. However, although forwarding paths might
be energy-efficient, this does not have to extend the lifetime of the
network. Some nodes may consume more energy than others, in-
creasing the probability of network partitions. Thus, algorithms
maximizing the lifetime were proposed. However, only consider-
ing the lifetime must not achieve good delivery rates and a low
energy consumption. The contribution of this paper is a forward-
ing metric that incorporates the end-to-end delivery, the required
energy costs, and in addition the residual energy of nodes being on
the forwarding path. Using simulations, we compare our scheme
with forwarding strategies based on other metrics and give insights
on its performance characteristics.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
C.2.1 [Network Architecture and Design]: Wireless Communica-
tion; I.6 [Computing Methodologies]: Simulations and Modeling
General Terms
Performance, Design, Algorithms
Keywords
Lifetime-Efficient Forwarding, Energy Efficiency, Wireless Sensor
Networks
1. INTRODUCTION
Consider a network of wireless sensor nodes that are capable of
sensing, processing, and communicating [1]. Due to advances in
micro-sensor and radio technologies, sensor nodes use low-cost and
low-power hardware that allows for densely populated networks.
Typical applications include habitat or environmental monitoring,
disaster detection, or military applications. In most cases, sensed
events are processed by a node and then forwarded to one or sev-
eral sink nodes. Since all nodes are scattered over a wide area,
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33
they cannot communicate with the sink node directly; intermediate
nodes are used for the message forwarding process.
For such many-to-one communication, many routing algorithms
were proposed [15, 22, 16, 23] that are based on different routing
metrics. One of the most important challenges is energy efficiency.
It is expected that most of the sensor nodes carry a limited and ir-
replaceable power supply. As the radio communication consumes
a large fraction of energy, the costs of data transmissions are most
critical and should be kept to a minimum. Energy-efficient routing
algorithms address this issue, with the goal of either minimizing
the energy consumption [12, 31, 30], or maximizing the network
lifetime [27, 18, 7]. Generally, routing algorithms that aim at min-
imizing the energy costs use shortest path algorithms, with the en-
ergy required for the transmission between two adjacent nodes used
as the edge cost. However, just minimizing the energy costs might
have a negative effect on the data delivery rate. A forwarding path
with low energy costs but high loss rates might not be very effi-
cient. On this account, the energy efficiency should incorporate
both energy consumption and the delivery quality.
However, although most of the routing algorithms are very ef-
fective, e.g., in reducing the energy consumption or maximizing
the energy efficiency, the overall network lifetime will not neces-
sarily be maximized. Once the forwarding paths are determined,
they remain stable as long as the costs do not change. Thus, it is
likely that nodes on the optimal paths are used quite often and run
out of energy quickly. This problem is addressed by maximum-
lifetime algorithms that aim at preventing the early “burn out” of
such paths. The network lifetime is commonly defined as the time
until the first node runs out of energy [4, 5] since this might cause
malfunctions or network partitions. However, there are also defini-
tions referring to the time where at least a fraction of α nodes are
alive or, concerning the area covered by the network, at least an α
coverage is maintained [36].
In comparison to existing work focusing on the maximum-
lifetime problem, we emphasize the existence of lossy links. Most
of the work in the literature assume that two nodes are able to com-
municate with each other without any packet loss as long as their
distance is lower than the radio range of the transceiver. However,
as many recent measurements have shown [38, 37, 28], most of the
links in a network experience a high variation in the packet recep-
tion rate. Thus, considering link losses either increases the energy
required for a packet to be delivered due to retransmissions or de-
creases the delivery rate in case the number of retransmissions is
not sufficient. In any case, taking the link loss into account may
have a significant impact on the energy efficiency of a routing al-
gorithm and the overall network lifetime.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. First, we
outline related work in the next section. Section 3 then describes
the maximum-lifetime problem in conjunction with a linear pro-
gramming formulation. Based on the Energy-Efficient Forwarding
strategy [6] which we review in Section 4, Lifetime-Efficient For-
warding is presented in Section 5. Models and assumptions made
in this paper are contained in Section 6. Section 7 shortly describes
other forwarding strategies used in our simulations for compari-
sion. The simulation results are presented in Section 8. Finally,
Section 9 concludes the paper and gives an outlook on future work.
2. RELATED WORK
Addressing energy consumption in wireless networks has been
an active research, considering several issues when designing
energy-aware networks [21, 24]. There exists much work on power
control algorithms where the goal is to find an optimal transmission
power for each node without the loss of connectivity [10, 14, 20,
25, 26, 33]. While still maintaining connectivity, the topology that
is formed may aim at improving the network throughput [10, 14],
to bound the number of one-hop neighbors [25], or to minimize the
overall power consumption required for routing [20, 26, 33]. In
[20], Lloyd et al. also study algorithmic aspects for minimizing the
total energy. Distributed algorithms are presented in [26] and [33].
A good survey on topology control issues can be found in [19].
On the other hand, several approaches are proposed that are not
designed for topology control but for power-aware or energy-aware
routing, aiming at either minimum-energy routing or maximum-
lifetime routing. The former approach tries to minimize the to-
tal energy required for a packet to reach its destination. How-
ever, nodes along the optimal path are used very frequently and
soon run out of energy, likely causing network partitions although
many nodes still have enough energy [29]. Furthermore, minimum-
energy routing causes an unbalanced power consumption. This is-
sue is addressed by algorithms that are designed to maximize the
network lifetime.
While classic routing protocols are based on minimum-hop rout-
ing [15, 16, 22, 23], power-aware algorithms are rather based on
power-based metrics that are used in conjunction with a shortest
path algorithm [30, 31, 32, 18]. Singh et al. propose several met-
rics for power-aware routing in [30], including cost per packet and
node, time until the network might get partitioned, consumed en-
ergy per packet and variance in residual energy. In [31], a localized
algorithm is proposed by Stojmenovic and Lin. Based on a node’s
lifetime and distance-based power metrics, they aim to extend a
node’s worst-case lifetime. In [32], Tho presents a conditional
max-min battery capacity routing algorithm that combines the min-
imum total energy routing and max-min residual energy routing. If
the minimum residual energy along a path is higher than a given
threshold, minimum total energy routing is performed. Otherwise,
the forwarding path is selected such that the minimum residual en-
ergy of a node on the path is maximized. In [18], Li et al. study
the problem of the maximum network lifetime, assuming the mes-
sage flow is not known a priori. They propose an approximation
algorithm called max − min zPmin that also tries to trade off be-
tween minimum transmission energy and max-min residual energy
routing. First, the algorithm determines the path with the small-
est transmission costs, with Pmin being its required energy and r
being the minimum residual node’s energy on this path. Then, all
edges whose residual energy is smaller or equal to r are removed
from the graph. This procedure is repeated until the total energy
of the minimum transmission energy path exceeds z times Pmin ,
where z ≥ 1. Li et al. have shown that their approximation is very
close to the optimal solution they obtained by linear programming.
The works in [9, 17, 27, 35] also formulate the problem of the
maximum network lifetime using linear programming. Chang and
34
Tassiulas [9] present a heuristic algorithm to solve the linear pro-
gram approximately. They consider two different models for the
information-generating process, the first assumes constant rates and
the second assumes an arbitrary generating process. An approx-
imation based on the Garg-Konemann algorithm [11] achieves a
(1 − 3)-approximation for any  > 0 [8]. While the heuristic
algorithm of Kalpakis et al. [17] improves this approximation to
(1 − ), it does not scale with the network size very well. A better
algorithm running time is achieved by Xue et al. [35]. They con-
sider the possibility of data aggregation, and in doing so improve
the running time by K, with K being the number of commodities,
where a commodity represents the data generated by a sensor node
and delivered to a destination. Sankar and Liu [27] finally formu-
late the problem as a maximum flow problem and adapt distributed
flow algorithms [2, 3].
3. THE MAXIMUM-LIFETIME PROBLEM
Consider a directed graph G(N, A) with N being the set of
nodes and A being the set of edges. If there exists a link be-
tween two nodes i and j, then (i, j) ∈ A with prrij denoting
the packet reception rate on that link. Furthermore, Ni defines the
set of neighbors of i, and s refers to the sink node. Let erx and
etx be the amount of energy units required to receive resp. send a
packet and Ei be the initial energy of a node i. Then, T refers to
the maximum-lifetime of the entire network, defined as the time in
rounds until the first node has no energy left.
If we assume that all nodes are connected and each node sends a
data packet to the sink every lifetime unit (round), we can formulate
the maximum-lifetime problem as a linear programming problem.
Let tij be the number of packets a node i sends to a node j over its
entire lifetime. Then, we are searching for optimal values t∗ij that
maximize T . Assuming infinite retransmissions of packets, the LP
is of the following form:
T → max
X X
LP 1:
s.t.
tji τji erx + tij τij etx ≤ Ei , ∀i ∈ N \{s}
X X
(1)
j:i∈Nj j∈Ni
tij = tji + T, ∀i ∈ N \{s} (2)
j∈Ni j:i∈Nj
ts,s = T (|N | − 1) (3)
with τij = 1
being the number of transmissions until a packet
prri,j
is received correctly.
Equation 1 covers the energy constraint. Due to simplicity, we
just consider the energy required to receive and transmit a packet.
The sink node is assumed to have infinite energy. Equation 2 refers
to the forwarding constraint that specifies that for each node the
number of outgoing packets is equal to the number of incoming
packets plus the number of packets originated at this node. In order
the make sure that all packets finally reach the sink, Equation 3 is
necessary, too.
4. ENERGY-EFFICIENT FORWARDING
In [6], we proposed two forwarding strategies called Single-
Link Energy-Efficient Forwarding (SEEF) and Multi-Link Energy-
Efficient Forwarding (MEEF). Forwarding paths are selected based
on an energy efficiency metric where the efficiency is defined as the
ratio between the end-to-end delivery rate and the energy required
for a message to reach the sink.
With MEEF, we further introduced the concept of multi-link for-
warding. In general, nodes that are not addressed in a packet header
as the destination temporarily turn their radio unit off to save en- a packet to a neighbor j, which in turn forwards the packet towards
ergy. However, it might be more efficient if some nodes stay awake the sink.
and overhear the packet, even if this requires more energy. In case For the multi-link case the calculation is quite similar but now
of packet loss, retransmissions of the entire packet might then be considers the fact that before a packet is retransmitted it is possible
prevented. If the actual receiver does not acknowledge the packet, that another node is able to forward it. Thus, ÊlR+1 is iteratively
another node may do so instead. That is, a node first determines computed by
a sorted set of potential forwarders, the forwarding set, which is X
added to the packet header. All nodes contained in this set stay ÊlR+1 = ai,α(j)−1 prrij L1ij + ai,n ÊlR
awake and receive the entire packet. If the first node of the sorted j∈Ωi

forwarding set does not acknowledge the packet, the sending node ..
tries to poll the next node of the set. If there is no node remaining, .
X (7)
the entire packet is retransmitted. The decision which nodes should Ê1 = ai,α(j)−1 prrij L1ij + ai,n L2ij
operate in such a backup mode is due to the MEEF strategy.
Q
j∈Ωi
Based on the definitions already used in the previous section, we
now define the energy efficiency. Let Eir be the end-to-end delivery with ai,k = j∈Ωi ,α(j)≤k (1 − prri,j ).
rate of node i, Eie be the overall required energy to deliver a packet Then, Eil is
to the sink, and Eief f be its efficiency defined as Eir /Eie . Then, for P ai,α(j)−1 prrij L2ij
a sorted set Ωi of n potential forwarding nodes, the MEEF strategy j∈Ωi 2
Eil = + aR+1
i,n Lij (8)
P (1 − ai,n )/(1 − aR+1
i,n )
locally maximizes

Eief f = P j∈Ωi ai,α(j)−1 prri,j Ejr

ai,α(j)−1 prri,j (Eje + b) + ai,n b
(4)
j∈Ωi
Q
for each node i by examining each neighbor j, with α(j) being the
position of node j in Ωi , ai,k = j∈Ωi ,α(j)≤k (1 − prri,j ), and
b = etx + nerx [6].
Intuitively speaking, a node selects an optimal set of helping
hands from its direct neighborhood with a small amount of effort
(the denominator of Expression 4) coupled with a large delivery
rate (the numerator). Those neighbors that maximize Eief f are fi-
nally chosen as forwarders. In case of n = 1, we get the SEEF
strategy since only a single neighbor is considered.
5. LIFETIME-EFFICIENT FORWARDING
While the efficiency of forwarding paths is one aim of a sensor
network, the entire lifetime is another but orthogonal one. Even if
for the multi-link case.
With these calculation, the SLEF and MLEF strategies select the
forwarder resp. forwarding set of a node i that maximizes Eief f ×
Eil , with Eief f being obtained from Equation 4.
6. MODELS AND ASSUMPTIONS
The loss model used in our simulations captures the packet re-
ception rate (PRR) on a link between two nodes as follows. Below
a distance D1 , nodes exhibit full connectivity, i.e., PRR is equal
to 1. Nodes are disconnected if they are at least distance D2 away
from each other. In the transitional region between D1 and D2 , the
expected reception rate decreases smoothly with some variation.
We model this behavior by
8>
<1h i 1
d < D1

all nodes always forward packets along the most efficient paths,
the network lifetime will not necessarily be maximized. More-
over, one problem that occurs during the lifetime of the network is
that some paths are used more frequently than others. Nodes along
these paths will spent more energy and die pretty soon. We account
for that with the Multi-Link and Single-Link Lifetime-Efficient For-
warding (MLEF resp. SLEF) strategies which try to maximize the
energy efficiency as well as the network lifetime.
Let Êlk be a measure for the expected minimum residual node’s
energy on a forwarding path towards the sink if up to k − 1 retrans-
missions are used. ÊlR+1 is then calculated iteratively by
ÊlR+1 = prrij L1ij + aij ÊlR
ÊlR = prrij L1ij + aij ÊlR−1
..
. (5)
Ê1 = prrij L1ij + aij L2ij
with aij = 1 − prrij , L1ij = min{ei , Ejl }, L2ij = min{ei , ej },
and ei being the residual energy of a node i.
With Eil being equal to ÊlR+1 , the lifetime measure of a node i
for the single-link case is then
prrij L1ij
Eil = + aR+1
ij L2ij . (6)
(1 − aij )/(1 − aR+1
ij )
In other words, Eil refers to the expectation of the minimum
residual energy of nodes that are affected if the node i forwards
>:
D2 −d
P RR(d) = D2 −D1
+X D1 ≤ d ≤ D2 (9)
0
0 d > D2
with [·]ba = max{a, min{b, ·}} and X ∼ N (0, σ) being a Gaus-
sian variable with variance σ 2 . For parameters set to D1 = 10,
D2 = 30, and σ = 0.3, the model shows similar characteristics as
the link loss model, e.g., presented in [38].
The simulations are carried out on a stationary network without
any mobility where nodes are uniformly distributed over a 100 ×
100 m2 field with a maximum radio range of 30 m. We assume
that each node already knows the reception rate of all its neighbors,
e.g., through packet reception measurements. Link estimators, as
analyzed in [34], could be used to provide this information.
We consider many-to-one communication with one sink and
several sensor nodes reporting data to the sink node periodically.
MAC-related issues are beyond the scope of this paper, but nodes
not participating in packet reception should be able to turn their
communication radio off to save energy. For each packet transmis-
sion, the required energy could be calculated as
e = etx + n · erx + (N − n) · ehrx (10)
where etx and erx are the amount of energy for packet transmission
resp. receiving, n the number of addressed receivers, and N the
number of neighbors within communication range. ehrx quantifies
the amount of energy required only for decoding the packet header.
We assume that nodes who are not receivers of a packet turn their
radios off as soon as they have heard the header.

35
 According to the first order model described in [13], etx and erx
are defined by
etx (d) = eelec + eamp · dα (11)
erx (d) = eelec (12)
for a distance d and a loss exponent α. We set eelec = 50 nJ/bit,
eamp = 100 pJ/bit/m2 , and a path loss exponent α of 21 . The
packet size is assumed to be 512 bit. The initial amount of a node’s
energy is set to 0.1 J. Due to simplicity, we neglect the energy
of detecting the packet header as well as the energy required for a
node to stay awake.
The overall network lifetime is subdivided into rounds and de-
fined as the number of rounds until the first node runs out of energy.
In each round, a certain amount of nodes issues a data packet that
is then transferred along the forwarding path towards the sink. The
propagation time on a link and the processing time at a node are
neglected. After each round, the forwarding paths may change due
to decreasing energy levels. Thus, for all forwarding strategies, the
paths are recomputed periodically.
7. OTHER FORWARDING STRATEGIES
We compare SLEF and MLEF with four other strategies that are
extended by a lifetime component which incorporates the residual
energy levels of forwarding nodes: (i) Hop-based Forwarding, (ii)
Er -based Forwarding, (iii) Minimum Transmission (MT) Forward-
ing, (iv) and a globally optimal LP relaxation. Except for the LP
solution, all forwarding strategies are based on a shortest path algo-
rithm. Therefor, let L = min(j,∗)∈φ {ej } be the minimum residual
energy on a forwarding path φ consisting of the set of forwarding
links towards the sink.
• Hop-based Forwarding: Based on a neighbors’ hop counter
h, the node with the smallest h × L−1 value becomes the
forwarder. In case of equal values, the node with the best
reception rate is selected.
• Er -based Forwarding: Defining
Q the the end-to-end delivery

ted over time. The simulations were carried out using a density of
rate of a node i by Eir = (j,k)∈φ 1 − (1 − prrjk )R+1 ,
the node that maximizes Eir × L becomes the forwarder of
i. In case of equal values, the node with the smallest hop
counter is selected.
• MT Forwarding: MT Forwarding attempts to minimize the
number of overall transmissions required to successfully de-
liver a packet. For the
P case of infinite retransmissions, the
node that minimizes (j,k)∈φ (prrjk ×L)−1 becomes a for-
warder. In case of finite retransmissions, MT Forwarding
P 1−(1−prrjk )R+1
minimizes (j,k)∈φ prrjk
× L−1 .
• LP Relaxation: In order to provide a globally optimal solu-
tion concerning the network lifetime, we use the linear pro-
gram described in Section 3. While for infinite retransmis-
sions LP 1 is sufficient, finite retransmissions requires an in-
teger program (IP) formulation in order to prevent routing
cycles. However, such an IP is quite complex concerning
its processing time. Thus, we just refer to the LP relaxation
achieved by LP 1. That is, although if finite retransmissions
are used during the data forwarding process, the paths are
computed based on the solution of LP 1 that assumes infinite
1 2
Since we assume that all nodes use a fixed transmission power, we
set d to the maximum radio range of 30 m.
36
retransmissions2 . In doing so, the solution can be considered
as a relaxation of the optimal solution.
8. SIMULATION
We simulated all forwarding strategies for different network den-
sities (number of nodes per radio range), with one sink node and a
fixed number of source nodes that issue data packets. For each
setting, the simulation was repeated 100 times such that each data
point in the graphs indicates the average value over 100 runs. The
number of retransmissions was set to three in all scenarios. Further-
more, simulation runs last for 1000 rounds, even if nodes run out of
energy. We believe that this simulation setup reflects a more real-
istic scenario than stopping the simulation as soon as the first node
consumes all its energy. Even if some nodes are dead and thus un-
able to generate or forward data, the rest of the network might still
be useable. Thus, we think that the total output of a network after
a fixed period is a more realistic performance measure.
8.1 Network Performance over Time
Concerning the network lifetime, it is expected that the LP
achieves the longest lifetime until the first node runs out of en-
ergy. According to the LP 1 formulation, the amount of data sent
by a node i to one of its neighbors j is expressed by tij over the
entire lifetime. Since the order in time packets are sent to neigh-
bors does neither change the total amount of consumed energy nor
the network lifetime itself (as long as each node sends tij packets
to its neighbor j) we can neglect it. Thus, wePcompute the ratio of
packets sent to a neighbor i by t̂ij = tij / k∈Ni tik . Note that
then forwarding paths do not change over time. Nevertheless, us-
ing several forwarding paths with only the fraction t̂ij of packets
(and thus of required energy) leads to the same lifetime and total
consumed energy. However, since all simulations are carried out
for 1000 rounds, the LP is recalculated every time a node runs out
of energy. Although this approach further relaxes the optimal so-
lution we still believe that the LP solution gives us a good upper
performance bound.
Figure 1 summarizes several performance metrics that are plot-
20 nodes with 10% of all nodes acting as source nodes that generate
a data packet in each round. Instead of describing each graph on
its own, we rather consider how each forwarding strategy performs
concerning the different metrics. Beginning with the LP solution,
Figure 1(a) shows its significant amount of consumed energy over
time. However, the minimum residual energy in the network, de-
picted in Figure 1(b), is always higher than for all other forwarding
strategies. Thus, it surely achieves a higher network lifetime until
the first node dies. Considering the amount of nodes being alive
over time, as depicted in Figure 1(f), also shows that nodes run
out of energy later in time. Besides the network lifetime, the num-
ber of packets delivered to the sink is another important metric.
Figure 1(c) shows the average delivery rate of a source node over
time. Although at the beginning the average delivery rate is only
80%, the LP solution performs quite well due to longer network
lifetimes. The minimum delivery rate depicted in Figure 1(d) also
shows that even the worst connected source node in the network
achieves a moderate but sufficient end-to-end delivery rate. Note
that the LP only maximizes the network lifetime and thus actually
does not take the delivery rate of data packets into account at all.
However, even if the LP shows promising results, it uses global
knowledge and is just shown for comparison.
Note that even if infinite retransmissions are allowed, the expected
number of retransmissions is finite and much lower.
 1 1
MLEF MLEF
0.95 SLEF 0.9 SLEF
HOP HOP
0.9 ER 0.8 ER
MT MT

Minimum Residual Energy

0.85 LP LP
Residual Energy 0.7
0.8
0.6
0.75
0.5
0.7
0.4
0.65
0.3
0.6
0.55 0.2

0.5 0.1

0.45 0
0 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900 1000 0 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900 1000
Time Time

(a) Residual Energy (b) Minimum Residual Energy

1 1
MLEF
0.9 0.9 SLEF
HOP
0.8 0.8 ER
MT
LP

Minimum Delivery Rate

0.7 0.7
Delivery Rate

0.6 0.6

0.5 0.5

0.4 0.4

0.3 MLEF 0.3

SLEF
0.2 HOP 0.2
ER
0.1 MT 0.1
LP
0 0
0 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900 1000 0 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900 1000
Time Time

(c) Delivery Rate (d) Minimum Delivery Rate

9 1
MLEF
SLEF
8 HOP 0.98
ER
7 MT 0.96
LP
Forwarding Path Length

Fraction of Alive Nodes

6
0.94
5
0.92
4
0.9
3
MLEF
0.88 SLEF
2
HOP
1 0.86 ER
MT
LP
0 0.84
0 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900 1000 0 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900 1000
Time Time

(e) Forwarding Path Length (f) Fraction of Alive Nodes

Figure 1: Forwarding Performance over Time (Density = 20, R = 3)

Hop-based Forwarding shows good results concerning the resid- that most of these nodes die pretty soon which is indicated by Fig-
ual energy, achieving the highest average value at the end of the ure 1(f). Dying nodes are likely close to the sink, thus source nodes
simulation time. Since this forwarding strategy is based on the might get partitioned from the sink, resulting in decreasing deliv-
shortest path measured in hops, it minimizes the forwarding path ery rates. Furthermore, in case of partitions, fewer nodes receive
length that is shown in Figure 1(e). Simultaneously, the number forwarding packets and consume less energy. Due to this, the av-
of nodes forwarding data packets is minimized. Thus, it is as- erage residual energy remains almost constant for simulation times
sumed that only a small fraction of nodes spends energy on packet greater than 700 (see Figure 1(a)). Concerning the average deliv-
forwarding. However, although Hop-based Forwarding consumes ery rate (Figure 1(c) and 1(d)), Hop-based Forwarding achieves the
the least total energy, some nodes consume significant more energy poorest results since in the majority of cases long-distance links
than others as shown by the minimum residual energy depicted in are quite lossy. Due to the same reason, the minimum delivery rate
Figure 1(b). That is due to the fact that most of the links on a for- during the lifetime of the network is very low and drops to zero
warding path experience a high packet loss due to long-distance pretty soon, likely because of network partitions or dying source
links and thus require many retransmissions. Hence, it is likely nodes. The best results concerning the delivery rate are achieved

37
by Er -based Forwarding at the beginning of the simulation time.
However, as it is shown in Figure 1(e), the forwarding paths are
very long since short-distance links show better reception rates.
Thus, many nodes are affected by packet forwarding, leading to
the highest energy consumption in the network (see Figure 1(a)).
Due to the quickly decreasing amount of residual energy, other for-
warding paths are selected that might not be optimal with respect
to end-to-end delivery. Interestingly, the forwarding path lengths
become shorter over time due to the high energy consumption on
the optimal path. At the same time, the end-to-end delivery rate
becomes worse. However, the fraction of alive nodes of Er -based
Forwarding performs poorly due to its high total energy costs.
With respect to the average end-to-end delivery, MT Forwarding
achieves similar results as Er -based Forwarding. However, con-
cerning the worst-connected source node, it performs worse. This
is actually not surprising since MT Forwarding tries to minimize
the number of packet transmissions regardless of the end-to-end
delivery rate. Figure 1(a) shows this difference on the basis of con-
sumed energy where MT Forwarding performs best, except for the
Hop-based Forwarding strategy. However, Hop-based Forwarding
causes network partitions more frequently and thus prevents that
some transmissions take place at all. The reduced energy con-
sumption of MT Forwarding is also shown by the forwarding path
lengths depicted in Figure 1(e). Compared to Hop-based Forward-
ing, MT Forwarding uses longer paths in order to avoid lossy links.
At the same time, it avoids paths that are too long as they are used
by Er -based Forwarding in order to save energy. Since MT For-
warding nevertheless achieves similar delivery rates as Er -based
Forwarding but with significantly less energy, it is more preferable.
Also concerning the number of nodes being alive, MT Forwarding
performs better due to its lower energy consumption.
At last, we consider the performance of SLEF and MLEF that
are proposed in this paper. As it is shown in Figure 1(a), both ap-
proaches consume more energy than Hop-based and MT Forward-
ing. However, until the middle of the simulation time, the con-
sumed energy of all four strategies is the same. Then, Hop-based
and MT Forwarding start to save energy due to dying source nodes
and network partitions. On the other hand, SLEF as well as MLEF
further consume the same amount of energy per round for a longer
time. At the end of the simulation, the total energy consumption of
MLEF is higher than the one of SLEF due to the multi-link concept
employed by MLEF that uses energy in a more efficient way, thus
causes network partitions later in time. Concerning the minimum
residual energy depicted in Figure 1(b), SLEF and MLEF perform
similar to Er -based and MT Forwarding. At first, Er -based For-
warding performs better since it prevents single nodes from spend-
ing too much energy due to long forwarding paths with few trans-
missions per link. Later it is slightly outperformed by SLEF and
MLEF due to changing forwarding paths used by both approaches.
However, the LP solution still achieves significant better results.
As Figure 1(c) and 1(d) suggests, the best delivery rates over time
(average and minimum) are achieved by SLEF and MLEF (maybe
except for the LP solution). Almost over the entire simulation time,
both strategies significantly perform better than Er -based and MT
Forwarding. The LP solution achieves a lower delivery rate at the
beginning, but benefits from longer network lifetimes. Due to its
global knowledge, the data traffic is spread throughout the network
in a more optimal fashion, resulting in a lower delivery rate but
a better traffic and energy balancing. Thus, at the end, the total
number of delivered packets might be higher than for SLEF and
MLEF. Regarding the average length of a forwarding path, Fig-
ure 1(e) shows that SLEF and MLEF use a similar path length as
MT Forwarding. However, with a decreasing residual network en-
38
ergy, both strategies change their forwarding paths, increasing the
number of used hops. Although this affects more nodes, it avoids
forwarding packets over low-energy nodes. Due to this, the fraction
of nodes being alive over time is better, as depicted in Figure 1(f).
Again, MLEF benefits from its multi-link concept and further im-
proves the results achieved by SLEF. It sometimes even performs
better than the LP solution. However, note that we used an LP re-
laxation that does not necessarily represent the optimal case.
8.2 Node Density
We now consider the impact of node density on the network per-
formance. The simulation setup is the same as in the last section,
with a varying node density between 10 and 50 nodes per radio
range. Note that the number of source nodes also varies since the
fraction of source nodes remains constant.
Figure 2 summarizes the most relevant performance characteris-
tics of all forwarding strategies. The network lifetime, i.e., the time
until the first node runs out of energy, is depicted in Figure 2(a). As
expected, the LP solution gives an upper bound on the network life-
time which increases for an increasing node density3 . Hop-based
Forwarding achieves the lowest network lifetime since individual
nodes spent significant energy on lossy links as we have already
seen in Figure 1(b). Er -based as well as MT Forwarding improve
the lifetime of Hop-based Forwarding and almost achieve similar
results. However, SLEF and MLEF consider the residual energy
of individual nodes in a more efficient way and further extend the
time until the first node has consumed all its energy.
However, extending the lifetime causes higher energy costs as
shown in Figure 2(b). For low node densities, the amount of resid-
ual energy is still high due to the loss of connectivity after a shorter
time period. Thus, disconnected source nodes do not issue any data
packets that must be forwarded by other nodes. If the node den-
sity increases, the network will be better connected allowing source
nodes to generate more data packets but at the same time consume
more energy. Further increasing the node density finally reduces
the energy consumption again since eventually a source node it-
self becomes the bottleneck of the forwarding path and runs out of
energy.
Figure 2(c) shows the average number of delivered packets to
the sink after 1000 rounds. Except for the Hop-based Forwarding
strategy, all other strategies benefit from an increasing node density.
In contrast, Hop-based Forwarding shows a constant delivery rate
for node densities larger than 15. This is mainly due to the short
lifetime of individual nodes and the usage of long-distance links.
Furthermore, for higher densities, the source nodes themselves run
out of energy first. For lower densities, the network is not con-
nected very well such that the network likely gets partitioned if
some nodes die. Thus, the delivery rate is significantly lower. Er -
based Forwarding suffers from its high total energy costs, resulting
in forwarding paths that are no longer optimized according to the
end-to-end delivery rate. It does not even achieve higher delivery
rates than MT Forwarding that on the other hand shows a better
trade-off of consumed energy and delivered packets. The LP so-
lution again benefits from a longer network lifetime and is able to
deliver more packets than Hop-based, Er -based, and MT Forward-
ing. However, SLEF performs better for high node densities since
it considers in addition to the minimum residual energy in the net-
work the node’s end-to-end delivery rate, too. Due to the multi-link
concept, MLEF is able to further improve these delivery rates and
outperforms all other strategies.
3
Since for high node densities the network lifetime of the LP so-
lution exceeds 1000 rounds, Figure 2(a) also shows the time when
the first node would actually be dead.
 1200 0.8

0.7
1000
0.6
800
Network Lifetime

Residual Energy
0.5

600 0.4

0.3
400
MLEF MLEF
SLEF 0.2 SLEF
200 HOP HOP
ER 0.1 ER
MT MT
LP LP
0 0
10 20 30 40 50 10 20 30 40 50
Node Density Node Density

(a) Network Lifetime (b) Residual Energy

1000 0.18

900 0.16
Average Number of Delivered Packets

800 0.14
700
0.12

Energy Efficiency
600
0.1
500
0.08
400
0.06
300 MLEF MLEF
SLEF 0.04 SLEF
200 HOP HOP
ER 0.02 ER
100 MT MT
LP LP
0 0
10 20 30 40 50 10 20 30 40 50
Node Density Node Density

(c) Delivery Rate (d) Energy Efficiency

Figure 2: Forwarding Performance for Different Node Densities

However, the trade-off between delivery rates and consumed en- tends the network lifetime significantly. For future work we plan to
ergy should not be ignored. We account for this by the energy integrate the approach into our existing Energy-Efficient Forward-
efficiency (ratio of delivered packets and consumed energy units) ing implementation on real sensor node platforms and study the
that is depicted in Figure 2(d). Er -based Forwarding shows the forwarding performance in real-world experiments.
worst energy efficiency due to its significantly higher energy costs.
While Hop-based Forwarding achieves very low delivery rates, it
also saves much energy, leading to a similar energy efficiency as
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