Investigating Wireless Sensor Network lifetime under static routing with unequal energy distribution

In a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) the sensed data must be gathered and transmitted to a base station where it is further processed by end users. Since that kind of network consists of low-power nodes with limited battery power, power efficient methods must be applied for node communication and data gathering in order to achieve long network lifetimes. In such networks where in a round of communication many sensor nodes have data to send to a base station, it is very important to minimize the total energy consumed by the system so that the total network lifetime is maximized. The lifetime of such sensor network is the time until base station can receive data from all sensors in the network. In this work1, besides the conventional protocol of direct transmission or the use of dynamic routing protocols proposed in literature that potentially aggregates data, we propose an algorithm based on static routing among sensor nodes with unequal energy distribution in order to extend network lifetime and find a near-optimal node energy charge scheme that leads to both node and network lifetime prolongation. Our simulation results show that our algorithm achieves longer network lifetimes mainly because the final energy charge of each node is not uniform, while each node is free from maintaining complex route information and thus less infrastructure communication is needed.