System-Level Energy Balance for Maximizing Network Lifetime in WSNs

Due to the limited energy supply, prolonging the network lifetime as much as possible is an important concern when designing the topology of wireless sensor networks. Different from designing complex routing and controlling sink node mobility, this paper aims at achieving system-level energy balance to maximize network lifetime. A general multi-ring structural model is developed to formulate the network lifetime by considering data flow, energy consumption on data transmission and receiving, and wireless harvesting. To explore the factors influencing the maximum network lifetime, a general optimization model considering ring depth, node densities, and inner ring transmitting probabilities is developed. Accordingly, the network optimization problem is divided into the following three scenarios: power control, non-uniform deployment, and probabilistic switching (ProSwit) routing. Particularly, ProSwit is a new method for maximizing network lifetime, and has not been considered before. Simulation results demonstrate that system-level energy balance with multi-hop routing can be achieved by exploiting all the above three schemes. Some useful topology control conclusions for prolonging network lifetime are also concluded.