Energy/Latency Trade-offs in Geographic Routing for Ultrawideband Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) may exploit accurate localization capabilities of ultrawideband (UWB) transceivers to improve performance of high layer protocols. We analyze power consumption of a WSN accommodating both communication and positioning into the same UWB transceiver and implementing a geographic routing algorithm, either the Greedy Perimeter Stateless Routing (GPSR) or its energy aware version, the e-GPSR. Power consumption depends on beacon rate for positions’ updates, the number of hops to reach the destination and the number of neighbors per node. On the other hand, the beacon rate impacts the reliability of the neighbor lists; the number of hops impacts on the end-to-end latency; the number of neighbors, i.e. the network connectivity, impacts on routing performance. The presented analysis assesses, by means of both theoretical investigations and simulation results, the main trade-offs between power consumption and latency that can be applied to obtain the best achievable performance.