Optimal energy balanced data gathering in wireless sensor networks

Unbalanced energy consumption is an inherent problem in wireless sensor networks where some nodes may be overused and die out early, resulting in a short network life-time. In this paper, we investigate the problem of balancing energy consumption for data gathering sensor networks. Our key idea is to exploit the tradeoff between hop-by-hop transmission and direct transmission to balance energy dissipation among sensor nodes. By assigning each node a transmission probability which controls the ratio between hop-by-hop transmission and direct transmission, we formulate the energy consumption balancing problem as an optimal transmission probability allocation problem. We discuss this problem for both chain networks and general networks. Moreover, we present the solution to compute the optimal number of sections in terms of maximizing the network lifetime. Numerical results demonstrate that our methods outperform the traditional hop-by-hop and direct transmission schemes and achieve significant lifetime extension especially for dense sensor networks.