Pipelined forwarding with energy balance in hexagonal wireless sensor networks

This paper presents pipelined forwarding with energy balance for hexagonal wireless sensor networks (H-WSN). An H-WSN consists of hexagonal clusters in which the distance between any two cluster heads is √3 × R, where R is the radius of a hexagonal cluster. A trade-off exists in pipelined forwarding for an H-WSN; i.e., reducing pipeline length can decrease data forwarding delay, but it will adversely increase the number of clusters, which consequently increases the total collecting time of a mobile sink. This paper therefore proposes a scheme to dynamically adjust the pipeline lengths and to periodically switch pipeline directions such that the overall throughput is increased and the energy consumption is balanced among all cluster heads.