Algorithms for balancing energy consumption in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Prolonging the lifetime of network is one of the most important designing objectives in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Keeping up the uniform energy consumption of various sensor nodes is an efficient approach to prolong the lifetime of WSNs. This paper concerns on the problem of balancing energy consumption of sensor nodes in clustering WSNs. Two methods are proposed to uniform energy drainage. One of them achieves the uniform energy consumption of nodes by taking different transmission radii according to the distance of sensor nodes to the cluster-head. The other is a hybrid communication mode, where sensor nodes not only send data to the cluster-head by multi-hop with the same transmission radius, but also send data directly to the cluster-head by one-hop with proper probabilities. Formulae to calculate energy consumption of sensor nodes are derived and two algorithms are given to determine the parameters in the two methods. Simulations show the proposed methods can balance the energy consumption of nodes effectively and prolong the lifetime of networks.