An adaptive energy balanced and energy efficient approach for data gathering in wireless sensor networks

Energy efficiency and energy balancing are the most stringent needs of wireless sensor network for prolonging its lifetime. As direct transmissions are costly, multi-hop approach is often used to collect the data of the nodes at the sink. However, many-to-one communication pattern in multi-hop communication may result in an unbalanced energy consumption in the network. Nodes closer to the sink deplete their energy at a faster rate than nodes that are further away. Mixed transmission approach, where each node trades-off between the cheaper hop-by-hop transmission and costlier direct transmission, is a good solution for balancing energy consumption. This paper proposes a receiver contention based mixed transmission scheme for energy balancing. In addition to distance and residual energy of the receivers, it also considers the link reliability and the number of neighboring nodes, in setting of the timer that will determine the relay node selection. The proposed approach gives more efficient and effective energy balanced data transmission as compared with the other works proposed in the literature. Its performance is evaluated and presented both analytically and through simulations, and the analytical estimations are validated by the simulation results. The simulation results show a significant improvement over the other closely related approaches. Moreover, the proposed approach can be easily used with both uniform as well as non-uniform node deployment.