A Transmission Range Reduction Scheme for Reducing Power Consumption in Clustered Wireless Sensor Networks

In this paper we propose a transmission range reduction scheme for a clustered wireless sensor network (WSN), in order to reduce power consumption while maintaining the network connectivity, particularly in scenarios where consecutive reporting of sensing values is inherent in the network. The platform WSN is based on a multi-hop clustering algorithm, where clusterheads send information to the sink via either gateway nodes or other clusterheads of intermediate clusters towards the sink. The main idea of this scheme is that the sink initially gathers the number of nodes or clusters in the network and instructs the reduction in the transmission range of the sensors until this number, hence connectivity is compromised. The proposed scheme does not require geographical information of nodes, and is independent of propagation model and environmental conditions that may cause non-uniform attenuation to radio signals. Furthermore, the scheme is independent of network topology, and can be applied to both uniform and non-uniform distribution of nodes. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the approach in two different clustering schemes, in regards to reducing energy consumption in the network.