BAIWL: Blacklisting Approach to Improve Wireless Sensor Network Lifetime

Due to their ease of deployment and autoconfiguration capabilities, the use of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) to monitor environment has become popular. Sensor nodes are known for their limited energy budget. They are sometimes deployed in unfriendly area. So, changing or recharging depleted battery is a hard task. Thus, energy management becomes a real challenge for the lifetime of the network. So, each node needs to optimize its energy consumption.In most routing protocols used in WSNs, the hop count metric is very often used as a route selection criterion. For transmitting data to a given sink, this approach favors the selection of nodes in the medium of the network. These nodes are very solicited to forward data to the sink. Thus, their energies are exhausted faster than other nodes. For a better distribution of the energy consumption due to data transmissions, we proposed an approach that forbids low residual energy node to be forwarder node. When an intermediate node finds that its residual energy is lower than a predefined threshold, it bans communicating control information to its neighborhood. Its low residual energy will be only used to transmit its own data. This approach has been compared to standard routing protocols used in WSNs, namely Hop count and RPL routing protocols. The obtained results show that with the blacklisting approach, we can significantly improve the network lifetime and packet delivery ratio.