A Study of Maximum Lifetime Routing in Sparse Sensor Networks

A major issue in wireless sensor networks is to prolong network lifetime by efficient energy management. In this paper we present an initial study of maximum lifetime routing in sparse sensor networks. We have studied simulations of how different heuristic routing algorithms influence the energy consumption of individual sensor nodes, and thus the functional lifetime of a sparse sensor network. The functional lifetime of the sensor network can be either until the first node has run out of energy or until a certain threshold of nodes has demised. We have also compared the maximum lifetime of the heuristic algorithms to the maximum lifetime of an optimal routing solution. Our simulations with nonaggregated data indicates that using one of the presented heuristic routing algorithms are not enough to find a near optimal routing. Our study is made in the AROS framework.