The balance of routing energy consumption in wireless sensor networks

In order to tackle the energy hole problem of sensor networks, the non-uniform node deployment strategy was presented recently. For achieving the expected performance of this deployment method, nodes need to transmit data to the sink node by selecting a node in the adjacent inner region decided by the deployment strategy. Since nodes near the outer boundary of a region will be covered by more nodes, the random selection method will cause the unbalanced energy consumption problem. In this paper, this issue is rigorously studied and a region constraint selection scheme is proposed based on the analytical result. By combining the region constraint strategy and the maximum energy node selection mechanism, a hybrid scheme is presented. Numerical and simulation results show that the region constraint scheme can achieve acceptable performance improvements over the random scheme and the hybrid mechanism also gains better performance in comparison to the maximum energy node selection scheme.

► The mathematical model of spatially unbalanced energy consumption for a random selection method is provided.
► The modification of the previous model for analysing a region constraint scheme is proposed.
► A hybrid scheme is described.
► Experimental results are shown.