A Routing Protocol with High Node Exchangeability for Sustainable Sensor Networks

Abstract

Recently, wireless sensor networks have been seen as a key technology for a ubiquitous computing society. In sensor networks, many network technologies have been developed, whose main concern is reduction of power consumption of sensor nodes. Moreover, these conventional approaches assume that a node in a sensor network operate in a finite quantity and initial battery of a node. However, if we use the sensor network in the natural environment, it means that the batteries of nodes must be exchanged to long term operation. From a viewpoint of the environmental sustainability it is also necessary for sensor nodes to be easily collected and replaced. This paper proposes a routing protocol for sensor networks with high node exchangeability in order to realize the continuous long-term operations of sensor networks. In the proposed routing protocol, power consumption of nodes is partially biased and the region is rotated in order to exchange a set of nodes easily. We evaluate the proposed routing protocol comparing with DSR, and a routing protocol where all nodes try to consume the battery equally. We use evaluation metrics biased toward transmitting data, the battery residue of nodes at the exchange time, the transition of operating nodes. The results show that the difference of the battery residue between the largest and the smallest nodes is 88% and node exchangeability improves by restricting the geographical area of exchanging nodes.