Maximizing system lifetime in wireless sensor networks

One of the most critical issues in wireless sensor networks is represented by the limited availability of energy on network nodes; thus, making good use of energy is necessary to increase network lifetime. In this paper, we define network lifetime as the time spanning from the instant when the network starts functioning properly, i.e., satisfying the target level of coverage of the area of interest, until the same level of coverage cannot be guaranteed any more due to lack of energy in sensors. To maximize system lifetime, we propose to exploit sensor spatial redundancy by defining subsets of sensors active in different time periods, to allow sensors to save energy when inactive. Two approaches are presented to maximize network lifetime: the first one, based on column generation, must run in a centralized way, whereas the second one is based on a heuristic algorithm aiming at a distributed implementation. To assess their performance and provide guidance to network design, the two approaches are compared by varying several network parameters. The column generation based approach typically yields better solutions, but it may be difficult to implement in practice. Nevertheless it provides both a good benchmark against which heuristics may be compared and a modeling framework which can be extended to deal with additional features, such as reliability.