Rectangular grids design to balance power consumption for homogeneous sensor networks with high node density

Abstract

Power consumption is an important issue in energy-constrained sensor networks. Many scheduling schemes have been proposed for sensor networks with high node density, to extend their lifetime by making only some nodes active while allowing others to go to sleep with negligible power consumption. However, most scheduling schemes do not take into account that the directional and uneven data traffic moving towards a data sink results in some areas running out of energy more rapidly than others, which may disconnect the network and the data sink, thereby wasting residual energy in other areas. This study proposes to balance the power consumption throughout the network for homogeneous sensor networks with high node density. The sensor network is partitioned into rectangular grids. Only one node is scheduled to be active in each grid at any time, to monitor that grid and to relay the data from other grids. To make energy stored in a grid proportional to the total power consumption of that grid, the lifetime of all individual grids is equalized. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm not only extends the lifetime but it also improves the performance of sensor networks by preventing some areas from being out of monitoring earlier than other areas when the connectivity of the network is lost.