Distributed Search for Balanced Energy Consumption Spanning Trees in Wireless Sensor Networks

Sensor networks are commonly used for security and surveillance applications. As sensor nodes have limited battery power, computing, and storage resources, the energy efficient security techniques are needed. We provide a new heuristic approach to search for balanced and small weight routing spanning trees in a network. The approach is a modification of Kruskal´s minimum spanning tree (MST) search algorithm and is based on a distributed search by hierarchical clusters. It provides spanning trees with a lower maximum degree, a bigger diameter and can be used for balanced energy consumption routing in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). The approach can be implemented in parallel as well as a simple locally distributed algorithm. Simulations of a realistic scenario WSN are done based on the transmission energy matrix. The simulation results show that the proposed approach can extend the functional lifetime of a WSN in 3-4 times in terms of sensor transmission energy. Possible preliminary clustering of the input network is considered as well.