HYMN to Improve the Longevity of Wireless Sensor Networks

Power aware routing in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) focuses on the crucial issue of extending the network lifetime of WSNs, which are limited by low capacity batteries. However, most of the previously proposed power aware routing algorithms have an inherent problem, which is the isolation of the sink node due to the quick power exhaustion of nodes that are close to the sink. In this paper, we propose a solution, referred to as HYbrid Multi-hop routiNg (HYMN), which addresses this problem by combining two routing strategies, namely flat multi-hop routing and hierarchical multi-hop routing. The former method aims at minimizing the total power consumption in the network while the latter attempts to decrease the amount of transferred data traffic by utilizing data compression. We present a mathematical analysis on the effect of the hybrid location on the performance of HYMN, and also demonstrate the effectiveness of HYMN through extensive simulations.