Empirical evaluation of the heat-diffusion collection protocol for wireless sensor networks

Heat-Diffusion (HD) routing is our recently-developed queue-aware routing policy for multi-hop wireless networks inspired by Thermodynamics. In the prior theoretical studies, we have shown that HD routing guarantees throughput optimality, minimizes a quadratic routing cost, minimizes queue congestion on the network, and provides a trade-off between routing cost and queueing delay that is Pareto-Optimal. While striking, these guarantees are based on idealized assumptions (including global synchronization, centralized control, and infinite buffers) and heretofore have only been evaluated through simplified numerical simulations. We present here the first practical decentralized version of HD algorithm, which we refer to as Heat-Diffusion Collection Protocol (HDCP), for wireless sensor networks. We present a thorough evaluation of HDCP based on real testbed experiments, including a comparative analysis of its performance with respect to the state of the art Collection Tree Protocol (CTP) and Backpressure Collection Protocol (BCP) for wireless sensor networks. We find that HDCP has a significantly higher throughput region and greater resilience to interference compared to CTP. However, we also find that the best performance of HDCP is comparable to the best performance of BCP, due to the similarity in their neighbor rankings, which we verify through a Kendall's-Tau test.