EBMD: Energy-Balanced Multi-path Data Propation Algorithm for Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks, energy-balanced data propagation is crucial to achieving satisfactory network lifetime. This paper presents a probability-based mathematical model to formulate the energy dissipated by data transmission of sensor nodes for arbitrary network topology. The mathematical model summarizes an extensive design space for routing, in which direct transmission and minimum transmission energy algorithms areincluded as its two special examples. Moreover, an approach using genetic algorithms (GA) is proposed to explore the suboptimal solutions of probabilities in order to guarantee the energy consumption more evenly in the process of data propagation. Finally, we provide the data propagation algorithm and its implement according to the probability values mentioned above. Our simulation results demonstrate that our algorithm makes the energy dissipation of sensor nodes in data transmission more uniformly than conventional algorithms and it almost does not lead to additional energy consumption.