Hybrid Data Transmission Algorithms for Energy Balancing in Wireless Sensor Networks

One of the main research problems in the area of wireless sensor network has been to prolong life-time of network by using energy efficient algorithms. Sensor nodes in WSNs has different energy consumption rate due to the uneven complexity of the sensing tasks and varying distance from sink node. Consequently this leads to fast energy disparity among the sensor nodes and unbalanced energy state in the network, which in turn result in short lifetime of the network. Therefore balancing energy consumption, in order to prolong network lifetime has become an important aim for WSNs. In this paper two algorithms are being proposed to better balance the energy dissipation in heterogeneous cluster-based WSNs. The first algorithm is called unequal width hybrid communication and the second is the equal width hybrid routing communication. Both algorithms use a hybrid data transmission mode which consists of a probability based energy balancing scheme that divides the network into K rings of unequal and equal widths respectively and find a set of probabilities Pi for each ring to balance the energy consumption. Simulation results have shown the validity of the algorithms which not only minimize the total energy consumption, but also balance the average per-node energy consumption across all nodes and hence prolong the sensor network lifetime.