A Balanced Energy-Consuming and Hole-Alleviating Algorithm for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

In wireless sensor networks, energy balancing and energy efficiency are the key requirements to prolong the network lifetime. In this paper, we investigate the problem of energy hole, in which sensor nodes located near the sink or in some other parts of the network die early due to unbalanced load distribution. Moreover, there is a dire need to utilize the energy resource efficiently. For this purpose, balanced energy consumption and hole alleviation, and energy-aware balanced energy-consuming and hole-alleviating algorithms are proposed. These algorithms balance the distribution of load along with efficient energy consumption. An optimal distance and energy-based transmission strategy with least expected error rate is adopted to forward the data packets of different sizes. Furthermore, the data distribution between high-energy consuming nodes and low-energy consuming nodes in each corona is analyzed. This distribution enables the proposed algorithms to outperform their counterparts in term of network lifetime, balanced energy consumption, and throughput on the cost of increased end-to-end delay.