On Balancing Energy Consumption in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) require protocols that make judicious use of the limited energy capacity of the sensor nodes. In this paper, the potential performance improvement gained by balancing the traffic throughout the WSN is investigated. We show that sending the traffic generated by each sensor node through multiple paths, instead of a single path, allows significant energy conservation. A new analytical model for load-balanced systems is complemented by simulation to quantitatively evaluate the benefits of the proposed load-balancing technique. Specifically, we derive the set of paths to be used by each sensor node and the associated weights (i.e., the proportion of utilization) that maximize the network lifetime.