WEMER: An energy hole mitigation scheme in Wireless Sensor Networks

In multi-hop Wireless Sensor Network (WSN), nodes closer to Base Station (BS) need to relay traffic from other nodes of the network which makes their energy depleted very fast and causes an energy hole in the network. Moreover, energy consumption among nodes is not balanced due to non-uniform distribution of nodes and it causes some node to drain out their energy faster than other nodes in the network. In WSN, this energy hole problem plays a key factor to reduce the lifetime of the network as data cannot be sent from other sensor nodes to the BS although the residual energy in the network remains high. In this paper, we propose a new scheme WEMER, based on WEdge MERging, to reduce energy holes in the network. In WEMER, the whole network is divided into many small equiangular wedges. When the residual energy of all the nodes within a wedge becomes less than 40% of their initial energy, thereby increasing the probability of energy holes creation, this wedge merges with the neighboring wedge to thwart the energy holes formation. Simulation results show that our proposed scheme balances the energy consumption among nodes and achieves much longer lifetime than the existing scheme like PEGASIS and CCS.