An Energy-Balanced Multi-Hop Relay Transmission Scheme Based on RVNS in DTMSN

Due to the limited energy of sensors and the difficulties in battery replacement in DTMSN (Delay Tolerant Mobile Sensor Network), unbalanced energy consumption will exhaust the batteries of active sensors soon, which can significantly reduce the network lifetime. Fortunately, this problem can be solved through multi-hop relay transmission where those energy-aware sensors with the maximum remaining energy will be selected to forward packets. However, one of the major challenges of multi-hop relay transmission in DTMSN is how to schedule these mobile sensors travelling paths in an energy-balanced way so that their overall lifetime is maximized. In this paper, an energy-balanced multi-hop relay transmission scheme based on RVNS (Reduced Variable Neighborhood Search) in DTMSN is proposed. Firstly, several parameters are designed to calculate the remaining energy of each sensor. Then RVNS is applied to obtain the global optimal solution. RVNS is implemented to select a sensor node with maximum remaining energy as the next hop relay, delivering packets to destination through multi-hop relay transmission. Simulation results demonstrate that in a delay-tolerant condition, the proposed scheme significantly balances the energy consumption and improves the packet delivery ratio.