Energy-balanced sampling workload allocation in wireless sensor networks

The quality of a wireless sensor network application is often measured by the number of samples collected in a period of time. Examples include debris flow monitoring systems, flood warning system and so on. In many situations, the number of collected samples has to be larger than a specific bound in order to reconstruct the monitored phenomenon. Considering that the network transmission consumes most energy in a wireless sensor network, the paths to forward collected samples back to the gateway have to be carefully chosen to avoid dead nodes and therefore network disconnection. In this paper, we investigate an optimization problem of balancing the energy consumption among sensor nodes while ensuring quality constraints. We prove that this problem is NP-hard and present a distributed algorithm. Our experiment results show that our method outperforms existing algorithms in balancing energy consumption of sensor nodes.