Energy balanced chain in distributed sensor networks

Abstract

With detection and monitoring requirements becoming more complicated and difficult, wireless sensor networks are envisioned to revolutionize the paradigm of collecting and processing information in diverse environments, such as on Mars' in-situ exploration. However, energy utilization by sensor nodes often impacts the application's life time due to limited battery capacity. One of the problems in energy utilization is that nodes near the base station lend to die earlier than other nodes because of their higher traffic. This paper suggests an energy balanced chain (EBC) which can efficiently prolong the sensor network lifetime by actively controlling the nodes' hop distances. In EBC, we formulate the energy balance optimization problem in terms of the segmentation space. By adjusting the transmission power, nodes with higher traffic have a longer hop distance than nodes with lower traffic. Further, numerical analysis results show that EBC performs significantly better than traditional hop-by-hop transmission.