Prolonging Network Lifetime via Nodal Energy Balancing in Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks

Practical implementation of balanced data routing algorithms in WSNs is challenging because of the heterogeneity among nodes inherited from the physical world in forms of different amount of nodal traffic, residual energy, data transmission rate and bandwidth. As the main concern in sensor networks is preserving nodes´ energy, such algorithms should balance energy depletion among nodes by carefully considering the impact of aforementioned heterogeneities to prolong the network lifetime. In this paper, a distributed energy balanced algorithm for data gathering and routing is proposed aiming to construct energy balanced routing trees in a network that contains heterogenous nodes. For this purpose, a game theoretical approach in which nodes can be selfish or cooperative players based on their roles in the network. Utility functions use local information of nodes and they are defined in a way that, while each node in selfish mode tries to achieve the most individual benefit, it implicitly helps to construct a balanced tree for the entire network. Evaluation and simulation results show noticeable improvement in generating more energy balanced routing trees, resulting longer network lifetimes compared to similar work in the literature.