Energy-efficient packet forwarding through network partitioning in wireless sensor networks

In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), multiple sources stream sensed data to the base station. As the base station is approached amount of streamed data becomes disproportionate to the number of forwarding nodes, causing excessive data forwarding at the nodes around the base station. We propose a packet forwarding framework to manage and reduce the energy dissipated at the nodes through partitioning the network into variable size regions. Our approach provides a means to control the transmission ranges of the nodes and the number of nodes serviced by a node as a forwarder. It is shown that the energy consumption in the network can be balanced through the optimal selection of the partition sizes. The proposed framework is shown to provide a simple solution to finding the optimum transmission ranges for balanced energy consumption in a densely deployed WSN, making it a practical forwarding strategy. The proposed framework does not require periodic message updates and it is suitable for implementation in dense networks.