Energy-balance routing for wireless sensor networks with scale-free characteristic

In this paper, an energy-balance routing strategy is proposed for prolonging the network lifetime for wireless sensor networks with scale-free characteristic. In order to avoid the nodes with high traffic using up their energy too early and prolong the network lifetime, the new routing strategy adopts the shortest path routing algorithm on weighted wireless sensor networks, where the weight values are calculated based on betweenness centrality of the nodes. Since the nodes with large betweenness centrality consumed energy more quickly, the network lifetime can be prolonged by distributing energy consumption from nodes with large betweenness centrality to nodes with small betweenness centrality by increasing weight value on every link that connects the node with the highest betweenness centrality to other nodes. Simulation results show that the proposed routing strategy is better than the shortest path routing as regards extending the network lifetime and balancing the energy consumption.