Performance Analysis of Data Delivery Schemes for a Multi-Sink Wireless Sensor Network

Wireless sensor networks are expected to be deployed in harsh environments characterised by extremely poor and fluctuating channel conditions. With the commonly adopted single-sink architecture, such conditions are exemplified by contention near the sink as a result of multipath delivery. This may be reduced by deploying multiple sinks spatially- apart e.g., along the edges of the network such that multiple spatially diverse paths that diverge like a starburst from each node towards these sinks can be set-up. Such an architecture opens up new challenges to the data delivery scheme, which determines the performance of the network. Since the compactness of sensors with limited energy resources restrict the use of sophisticated mechanisms, we consider simple data delivery schemes suited for such a multi-sink architecture. We optimise a single-path data delivery scheme with simple ARQ for a spatially-invariant environment, and demonstrate that its optimality over a spatially-diverse multipath scheme extends to spatially-variant environments. We also verify our analysis with simulations obtained using the Qualnet simulator.