Comparison of Data Rate and Energy Per Node of Wireless Sensor Network Under Small Scale Fading

In this paper two widely used algorithms: Maximum Flow and Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) are applied in a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) to send information from a member node to a cluster Head (CH). Two parameters of wireless link: Shannon information rate and energy consumption per node for the above two algorithms are compared under three types of fading channels: Nakagami-m, Rician, and Rayleigh. To observe the impact of small-scale fading on the performance of the network, the steady state phase of WSN is considered instead of cluster formation. The final outcome of the paper is that the Nakagami-m channel is found as the best case and Rayleigh as the worst case, where Rician provides an intermediate result in the context of throughput. Again, the maximum flow algorithm provides better throughput compared to OSPF keeping the channel condition fixed. In the context of energy per node OSPF is found better than the case of maximum flow algorithm. The entire comparisons are shown both graphically and in tabular form. The combination of the maximum flow algorithm and Nakagami-m fading is found as the best to achieve maximum throughput whereas energy consumption per node totally depends on the topology of the network but the same combination shows the best result for most of the cases.