Energy consumption balancing in Wireless Sensor Networks

Increasing a functional lifetime of a network is utmost important criterion in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) because of limited energy resource of nodes. Since, a functional lifetime requires either all or a certain percentage of nodes to be alive altogether, energy consumption balancing is important. Energy consumption balancing (ECB) property ensures that the average energy dissipation per sensor is equal for all sensors in the network ECB can be considered as energy efficiency property that optimally manages energy consumption of sensors to prolong network lifetime. There is a recent research trend of studying energy consumption balancing. We investigated the concept of ECB and ECB related approaches concisely. Further, we provide a classification of the ECB approaches in the literature and present their core ideas, merits and demerits. Besides, we discussed the open research issues and future research directions.