Energy Load Balancing Strategy to Extend Lifetime in Wireless Sensor Networks

Applications with periodic data generation for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) require the maximum lifetime of the network in order to provide a constant and reliable service. Therefore, a minimal consumption for sensing and communication must be considered in order to extend the lifetime of the network. In this sense, the network must be capable for sending data from targets to sinks in a reliable way taking account limited capacities involved in a WSN. Consequently, data from targets must be specially treated to guarantee reliability at minimum energy consumption to extend lifetime of the network. For this reason, in this paper we propose a mathematical formulation and a heuristic to support connectivity, flow conservation constraints, data capacity per link, constraints related with communication and sensing range of sensors, and splitting constraints in order to balance the energy consumption to prolong the sensors lifetime. The results show improvements in terms of number of transmissions per sensor prolonging the lifetime of the network and assuring communication paths between targets and sinks. With this approach, we aim to use efficiently the energy resources of the network and, then, extend the lifetime of the network in comparison with a single path scheme in a WSN.