Unequal Initial Energy Assignment in Wireless Sensor Networks

In multi-hop clustering Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), Cluster Head (CH) role is rotated among sensor nodes in order to balance their residual energy usages. However, to forward data from CHs to sink or Base Station (BS), CH nodes that are placed near to the sink consume more energy than CH nodes that are further away. This is known as “Energy Hole” problem in WSNs. This paper proposes an algorithm called “Unequal Initial Energy Assignment” or UIEA to determine initial energy for sensors based on their distances to the sink. This unequal energy assignment is to assign different values of initial energy to sensors that belong to different regions in the network field. Since CHs perform data aggregation, this approach allows sensors to operate using same cluster sizes throughout deployed network field, which is one of the important requirements for some specific applications. Performance from simulation shows that UIEA can get more detail and precise data after aggregation by deploying smaller cluster size than average EC cluster size while the Stable Operation Period (SOP) is approximately the same as EC solution.