Multihop/Direct Forwarding (MDF) for static wireless sensor networks

Abstract

The success of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) depends largely on efficient information delivery from target areas toward data sinks. The problem of data forwarding is complicated by the severe energy constraints of sensors in WSNs. In this work, we propose and analyze a data forwarding scheme, termed Multihop/Direct Forwarding (MDF), for WSNs where sensor nodes forward data traffic toward a common data sink. In the MDF scheme, a node splits outgoing traffic into at most two branches: one is sent to a node that is h units away; the other is sent directly to the data sink. The value of h is chosen to minimize the overall energy consumption of the network. The direct transmission is employed to balance the energy consumption of nodes at different locations and to avoid the so-called hot spot problem in data forwarding. In order to calculate its traffic splitting ratio, a node only needs to know the distance toward the common data sink and that of the farthest node. Our analytical and simulation results show that the MDF scheme performs close to, in terms of energy efficiency and network lifetime, the optimum data forwarding rules, which are more complex and computation intensive.