Prolonging WSN Lifetime with Data-Location Similarity and Weakest Node Protection

Each sensor node in a wireless sensor network (WSN) mainly consumes energy to sense the environment and convey or relay the sensed data to a sink node. Once the resident energy in a sensor node is drained, this may cause incomplete sensing coverage, resulting in WSN failure. The lifetime of a network begins when the network starts working and ends when the first node becomes ineffective from energy exhaustion caused by any of the sensor nodes in the WSN. This paper proposes a scheme that clusters sensor nodes by node reading and by node location. By using the resident energy and coverage of each node, the scheme proposes a weakest node protection mechanism to balance the energy consumed by each node, to extend the network´s lifetime. The evaluation results validate the proposed concept and show the proposed scheme can even obtain additional 12.5% network lifetime compared to other existing ones.