Grid-Based Approach for Energy-Balanced Node Deployment Control in Wireless Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks, much research has focused on improving energy consumption and network lifetime due to limited power available on sensor nodes. The imbalance of node energy consumption results in the network partition blocking data transmission from sources to sinks. This paper proposes an efficient node deployment control protocol to achieve balanced energy consumption among sensor nodes. Firstly, a binary virtual tree topology is constructed based on grids. Secondly, considering the traffic load of each sensor node, a more efficient virtual tree topology is reconstructed by optimizing link directions. Because the reconstructed tree uses diagonal grids, performance is dramatically improved in terms of energy efficiency and the duration of data transmission. Simulation results confirm that the proposed scheme reduces the total energy consumption up to 16% and improves the network lifetime up to 33% compared to an existing binary virtual tree, by balancing power consumption of sensor nodes efficiently.