A coarse-grained bottleneck detection method with data buffer mechanism for wireless sensor networks

The bottleneck has a faster energy consumption rate than other nodes, and it may lead to network partition in wireless sensor networks. To save the energy of the bottleneck, we suggested a coarse-grained bottleneck detection method based on the data path for multi-hop wireless sensor networks. Moreover, a data buffer mechanism around the bottleneck was introduced to reduce the control frames in media access control layer. Experiments showed our scheme can prolong the network lifetime, but it also caused a little longer delay.