A More Energy Efficient Network Setup Method for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks are one of the pioneer technologies of the new century. The low cost of these networks makes them applicable to a variety of areas from battlefields and environment monitoring to health and house appliances. A sensor network is composed of a large number of low cost sensor nodes, which are densely deployed for a specific application inside a usually small environment (I.F. Akyildiz et al., 2002). Unfortunately their low cost restriction imposes a kind of conservative view on resource consumption. Network setup is one of the power consuming procedures in initialization of the network. In the setup stage, the base station constructs the routing table of all nodes. The total energy of network setup is just before the main function of the network, so decreasing this energy helps the network to perform more functions before its energy exhausts. The purpose of this paper is to decrease the overall energy of setup phase in two ways, first tiny encryption algorithm (TEA) for security purposes, which are essential for any wireless network against adversaries and unauthorized accesses. This encryption algorithm decreases the amount of computations and memory consumptions. Further more, it defines some kinds of groups to decrease the number of message exchanges and amount of traffic and hence the energy consumed. Simulation results show our proposed method decreases the total amount of energy consumptions in the setup stage and convergence time of the route table compared to the traditional setup method