Energy efficient wireless sensor networks using linear-programming optimization of the communication schedule

This paper builds on a recent method, chain routing with even energy consumption (CREEC), for designing a wireless sensor network with chain topology and for scheduling the communication to ensure even average energy consumption in the network. In here a new suboptimal design is proposed and compared with the CREEC design. The chain topology in CREEC is reconfigured after each group of n converge-casts with the goal of making the energy consumption along the new paths between the nodes in the chain as even as possible. The new method described in this paper designs a single near-optimal Hamiltonian circuit, used to obtain multiple chains having only the terminal nodes different at different converge-casts. The advantage of the new scheme is that for the whole life of the network most of the communication takes place between same pairs of nodes, therefore keeping topology reconfigurations at a minimum. The optimal scheduling of the communication between the network and base station in order to maximize network lifetime, given the chosen minimum length circuit, becomes a simple linear programming problem which needs to be solved only once, at the initialization stage. The maximum lifetime obtained when using any combination of chains is shown to be upper bounded by the solution of a suitable linear programming problem. The upper bounds show that the proposed method provides near-optimal solutions for several wireless sensor network parameter sets.