Energy Provisioning Technique to Balance Energy Depletion and Maximize the Lifetime of Wireless Sensor Networks

With the promising technology of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), lots of applications have been developed for monitoring and tracking in military, commercial, and educational environments. Characteristics of WSNs and resource limitation impose negative impacts on the performance and effectiveness of these applications. Imbalanced energy consumption among sensor nodes can significantly reduce the performance and lifetime of the network. In multi-hop corona WSN, the traffic imbalance among sensor nodes will make nodes located near to the sink consume more energy and finish their energy faster than those distant from the sink. This would cause what is called “energy hole”, which prevents the network from performing the intended tasks properly. The objective of the work in this paper is to balance energy consumption to help improving the lifetime of corona-based WSNs. To maximize the lifetime of the network, an innovative energy provisioning technique is proposed for harmonizing the energy consumption among coronas by computing the extra needed energy in every corona. Experimental results of the evaluation revealed that the proposed technique could improve the network lifetime noticeably via fair balancing of energy consumption ratio among coronas. Keywords—Wireless Sensor Network (WSN); Lifetime; Node deployment; Energy provisioning