Maximizing energy utilization of routing in wireless sensor networks

The recent interest in wireless sensor networks has led to a number of routing schemes that aim at utilizing the limited resources available at sensor nodes more efficiently. This paper proposes and evaluates `Range Switching´, a routing scheme that aims at increasing the energy utilization of routing protocols. Range switching is applicable to any routing protocol. In this paper, we apply Range Switching to the Gradient Based Routing (GBR) protocol. Experimental results and mathematical analysis show that Range Switching if combined with some network traffic spreading schemes can increase the Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) life-time.