Mesh networking backbone with equalized power consumption cells to prolong the lifetime of large sensor networks

Abstract

Energy efficiency is crucial for a sensor network. Although many schemes have been proposed to prolong the lifetime of sensor networks, most schemes do not take into account that the nodes near the data sink encounter higher data traffic and will run out of energy sooner disconnecting the data sink and the network. The uneven traffic becomes more serious when the size of the network increases. This paper proposes to combine cellular structures and mesh networks to form a backbone of a large sensor network. In this algorithm, the sensor network is partitioned into many equal cells. Each cell has a local controller with enough needed resources at the center to collect the data and to form the mesh networking backbone. The collected data is then forwarded to the data sink by the local controller for further analysis. Each cell is divided into the same number of circular layers. By equalizing the lifetime of each layer in one cell, all layers in that cell will run out of energy simultaneously and consequently so will the entire network. In addition, a scheme to direct the route requests towards the local controller in each cell is proposed to reduce the flooding in route discovery.