An Energy-Efficient Redundant Nodes Tree Mechanism for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor nodes are tiny and energy limited, so the enhancement of lifetime of sensor networks is an open issues which relates to energy balance and energy saving. In this paper, we propose an energy-efficient redundant nodes tree (EERNT) mechanism in which the redundant nodes in each cluster can be used to relay information to the base-station. The principle is that the redundant nodes relay tree is constructed according to the position of the redundant nodes and all the information received by the cluster heads is sent to the closest redundant node of the EERNT. The selected redundant node transmits the information to the base-station by the relaying of EERNT. Simulation results show that EERNT can improve the lifetime of wireless sensor networks efficiently under the condition that the nodes are distributed comparatively dense and the networks have redundant nodes in most clusters.