Architecture Design of an Integrated Communication and Broadcasting Network

Due to power limitation of nodes in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), how to maximize network lifetime has become a critical issue for deployment of WSNs. Although several schemes have been proposed for 2D WSNs, few for 3D WSNs are known. In this paper, we present a scheme for maximizing network lifetime in 3D WSNs through balancing energy consumption, as an extension of the existing scheme for 2D WSNs proposed recently [1]. Same as [1], we formulate the energy consumption balancing problem as an problem of optimal distribution of transmitting data by combining the techniques of sphere-corona based network division, mixed-routing and data aggregation. We first present a Tiled-block based routing scheme in order to balance energy consumption among nodes in each sphere-corona. Then we design an algorithm to compute the optimal distribution ratio of transmitting data between direct and hop-by-hop transmissions, with the purpose of balancing energy consumption among nodes across different sphere-coronas. Finally we show how to maximize network lifetime through computing the optimal number of sphere-coronas. Simulation results show that our scheme is superior to conventional direct and multihop transmission schemes in network lifetime.