Survey on network lifetime research for wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor network consists of large number of sensor nodes randomly distributed in some regions. Each node has a limited energy supply and generates information when some events that need to be communicated to a sink node occur. It has been proved that the nodes closer to the sink node will use up their energy more quickly, as a result, the network lifetime will be affected, some bad consequences will happen. Therefore how to optimize the network lifetime become an important problem. According to the research fruit many researchers have contributed, we concluded that the method of optimizing the network life included keeping energy effectivity, improving or creating some optimized algorithms, making use of the inherent mechanism of nodes and so on. The network lifetime can depend on many other factors too. In the paper we give out the survey of the sensor network lifetime and do some analysis.