Neighborhood-Aware Density Control in Wireless Sensor Networks

In dense wireless sensor networks, density control is an important technique for prolonging network's lifetime. However, due to the intrinsic many-to-one communication pattern of sensor networks, nodes close to the sink tend to deplete their energy faster than other nodes. This unbalanced energy usage among nodes significantly reduces the network lifetime. In this paper, we propose neighborhood-aware density control (NADC) to alleviate this undesired effect by reducing unnecessary overhearing along routing paths. In NADC, nodes observe their neighborhoods and dynamically adapt their participation in the multihop network topology. Since the neighborhood information can be easily observed through the overheard information, the density in different regions can be adaptively adjusted in a totally distributed manner. Simulation experiments demonstrate that NADC alleviates the extremely unbalanced workload and extends the effective network lifetime without significant increase in data delivery latency.