Energy-Balanced Transmission Policies for Wireless Sensor Networks

Transmission policy, in addition to topology control, routing, and MAC protocols, can play a vital role in extending network lifetime. Existing transmission policies, however, cause an extremely unbalanced energy usage that contributes to early demise of some sensors reducing overall network´s lifetime drastically. Considering cocentric rings around the sink, we decompose the transmission distance of traditional multihop scheme into two parts: ring thickness and hop size, analyze the traffic and energy usage distribution among sensors and determine how energy usage varies and critical ring shifts with hop size. Based on above observations, we propose a transmission scheme and determine the optimal ring thickness and hop size by formulating network lifetime as an optimization problem. Numerical results show substantial improvements in terms of network lifetime and energy usage distribution over existing policies. Two other variations of this policy are also presented by redefining the optimization problem considering: 1) concomitant hop size variation by sensors over lifetime along with optimal duty cycles, and 2) a distinct set of hop sizes for sensors in each ring. Both variations bring increasingly uniform energy usage with lower critical energy and further improves lifetime. A heuristic for distributed implementation of each policy is also presented.