Multi-electrode excitation is an effective way to improve the performance of 3D electrical tomography (ET) system compared with single electrode excitation. This paper systematically discusses various sensing strategies for multi-electrode excitation with different combinations in radial and axial directions. A typical 3 × 8 3D ERT sensor is adopted to analyze the influence of different excitation modes on performance indexes, such as number of independent measurements, dynamic range of measurements, sensitivity distribution and correlation coefficient of image reconstruction. On the basis of radial rotation angle between the excitation electrodes mapped to the same plane and whether the excitation electrodes are located in the same axial layer, five typical electrode combination modes are designed under dual-electrode excitation and single-electrode measurement protocol. The results show that the variation trend of different indexes influenced by excitation mode is inconsistent. The entropy-based method is applied to comprehensively evaluate the different excitation modes with the selected multiple performance indexes. Among all above modes, the mode in which excitation electrodes are vertically aligned is better universal one. The experimental results show that the position characteristics of the preferable mode can obtain better image reconstruction quality in different distribution models. Furthermore, the better excitation mode will provide guidance for design of other multi-electrode excitation in 3D ET systems with different structures.