Multipath energy balancing for clustered wireless sensor networks

In wireless sensor networks, sensors at different locations in the field use different energy levels to propagate sensing data back to the sink or base station. This causes unbalanced energy usage among sensors and also lowers the network lifetime. Currently there are several techniques to mitigate this problem, such as deploying multiple sinks, adding more sensors on heavy traffic areas, or managing the size of clusters depending on the distance from sensor to sink. In this paper, we propose a distributed algorithm and protocol called Multipath Energy Balancing (MEB) to mitigate unbalanced energy usage in clustered wireless sensor networks using multi-path and multi-hop, with a transmission power control approach. The network field is divided into regions, where the ratio of inter-region transmission traffic from all cluster head sensors in one region to other cluster head sensors in the two regions in front can be pre-computed and pre-programmed into the sensors to ease sensor deployment. To further prolong network lifetime, we also present a simple heuristic algorithm to procrastinate cluster formation and routing. Simulation results show that MEB can balance energy much better than Energy-efficient Clustering (EC) and Balancing Energy Consumption (BEC) solutions. It also has a longer network lifetime than EC and BEC protocols, especially when the required cluster size is small. Procrastinating cluster formation and routing also can further improve the network lifetime.