An Energy-Balanced Variable Range Transmission Scheme in Wireless Sensor Networks

Prolonging the network lifetime is one of design challenges for data transmission in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) which are affected by the energy sink-hole problem. Recent researches show the energy sink-hole problem can be overcome by balancing the sensor energy consumptions. In this paper, we present an energy-balanced consumption scheme by varying the transmission ranges of sensors in a circular WSNs. In our scheme, the circular field is sliced into K concentric circular bands with different widths, the sensors deliver its data to the sink with a range of the band width in a hop-by-hop mode. The analysis shows that to keep energy-balanced consumption the widths of the bands can be determined only by the first band (the inner band) width. To meet the constraints of fixed circular network radius, a binary search algorithm has been designed for searching the first band width. Numerical results show that the band widths should become wide with its distance to the sink increasing in order to guaranteing the energy-balanced consumption. It is also shown that there is an optimal band number to minimize the total energy consumption, which is proportional to the network circular radius, that is there is an optimal average band width.