Network Lifetime Extension Evaluation of Energy Harvesting and Clustering Approaches in WSNs

The energy hole problem is one of the key challenges in Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) technologies that affect the network’s lifetime, even though there might be an on average large amount of energy available to the network’s nodes. In order to tackle the energy hole problem’s effects (i.e., sensor nodes close to the sink consume a considerable amount of their energy for relaying purposes), in this paper two approaches that are proposed in the literature, i.e., energy harvesting and clustering, are considered and evaluated through simulations. It is shown here that under energy harvesting, the network lifetime is prolonged, the latter prolongation to be more effective for low energy consumption regarding the sink. Additionally, it is shown that clustering approaches are effective and can increase the networks’ lifetime. This is observed in this paper, especially for the case where the number of data packets generated within the sink’s cluster is decreased.