Improving network lifetime by minimizing energy hole problem in WSN for the application of IoT

Abstract

The world today is at the Internet of Things (IoT) inflection point with more number of products adding to its intelligence system through a wide range of connectivity. Wireless sensor Networks (WSN) have been very useful in IoT application for gathering and processing of data to the end user. However, limited battery power and network lifetime are few of the major challenges in the designing process of any sensor network. One of those is the Energy Hole Problem (EHP) that arises when the nodes nearer to the sink or base station die out early due to excess load as compared to other nodes that are far away. This breaks the connection of the network from the sink which results in shortening the lifetime of the network. In this paper, a trade-off is maintained between network lifetime and power requirement by implementing a sleep-awake mechanism. With the help of MATLAB simulations, it is found that after applying the mechanism, the network lifetime was extended to almost 300 and 700 rounds for TEEN and LEACH protocol respectively. The results will be beneficial for the design process in WSN for IoT application.