Energy averaging schemes for ad hoc wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Power consumption is an important issue in energy-constrained ad hoc wireless sensor networks. Many schemes have been proposed in this field to prolong the lifespan of the networks. However the rates of power consumption in different areas of the network are different. Though some schemes do save energy in some areas in the network, running out of energy earlier in other areas causes the connectivity of the network to be lost because of the limited RF range of the sensors. This paper proposes two schemes to average the power consumption of the whole sensor network. In this design, two scenarios are considered: optimized connectivity (OC) for networks with high-density sensors and cluster re-partitioning (CRP) for networks with low-density sensors. Simulation results show that, the energy in the entire network is all together used up almost simultaneously so that no energy is wasted. Therefore the lifespan of the whole networks is prolonged.