Balancing energy consumption with mobile agents in wireless sensor networks

For Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), an unbalanced energy consumption will decrease the lifetime of network. In this paper, we leverage mobile agent technology to investigate the problem of how to balance the energy consumption during data collection in WSNs. We first demonstrate that for a sensor network with uniform node distribution and constant data reporting, balancing the energy of the whole network cannot be realized when the distribution of data among sensor nodes is unbalanced. We design a method to mitigate the uneven energy dissipation problem by controlling the mobility of agents, which is achieved by an energy prediction strategy to find their positions. Finally, we propose energy balancing cluster routing based on a mobile agent (EBMA) for WSNs. To obtain better performance, the cluster structure is formed based on cellular topology taking into consideration the energy balancing of inter-cluster and intra-cluster environments. Extensive simulation experiments are carried out to evaluate EBMA with several performance criteria. Our simulation results show that EBMA can effectively balance energy consumption and perform high efficiency in large-scale network deployment.

► The energy balance of sensor network with uniform node distribution is shown to be impossible.
► A solution is proposed to mitigate uneven energy dissipation.
► The new designed EBMA can effectively balance energy in large-scale networks.