Power efficient stochastic - wireless sensor networks

Energy utilization is a challenging problem in wireless sensor networks due to the limited battery capacity in sensor nodes. This paper presents a fundamentally different design of an energy-efficient WSN, named stochastic-WSN (S-WSN). Two main energy-saving techniques are proposed: (i) optimal traffic flow and (ii) efficient scheduling and routing protocol to implement the optimal traffic flow. By using the optimal traffic flow, each sensor can decide its own activity in the routing procedure, thus, S-WSN realizes near-zero network administrative overhead. The optimal traffic flow provides a constructive approach for defining a scheduling algorithm, which keeps only a small subset of nodes awake in the network to provide connectivity while placing the majority of nodes in sleep mode. It reduces power consumption as well as operation interference. The network lifetime obtained using S-WSN provides a significant improvement as compared to using the energy balanced data propagation (EBDP) approach