A balanced energy consumption solution for wireless sensor networks with failure clusters

In energy constrained wireless sensor networks, it essentially requires to make full use of the energy and maximize the network lifetime even when facing some unexpected situations. We consider an emergent situation that a mobile cluster head is broken down, which leads to the missing packets. We aim at recovering the failure cluster and achieving balanced energy consumption to prolong the network lifetime. An efficient approach is proposed for recovering the failure cluster by selecting multiple static sensor nodes as the cluster heads to collect packets and transmit them to the sink node. Simulated Annealing algorithm is utilized to achieve the uniform deployment of the cluster heads. The new cluster heads are dynamically changed in order to keep energy consumption balanced based on our energy consumption model. Among the new cluster heads, packets are transmitted through multi-hop forwarding path found by Dijkstra´s algorithm, which is dynamically updated according to the energy cost of the path and current energy of the node. The experimental results show that lifetime is prolonged and the failure cluster is recovered.