Energy Consumption Analysis for Sensors in Multi-sink Wireless Sensor Networks

A multi-sink wireless sensor network (WSN) is composed of a large number of sensors deployed in a wide area and there are some special sensors referred as sinks which play the role of data collector. Since sensors located in different positions may bear different communication responsibilities, e.g. forwarding the data generated by some other sensors, the loading of each sensor in network is heterogeneous. In this paper, we evaluate the energy consumption of sensors deployed uniformly in multi-sink WSNs. With the knowledge of load distribution of a network, a sensor deployment strategy by density control is also proposed to balance the loading of sensors in different tiers, prolong the network lifetime, and increase the successful data delivery as possible. Simulation results show that the data delivery and survival rates are significantly improved by the proposed methods.