Promoting Heterogeneity, Mobility, and Energy-Aware Voronoi Diagram in Wireless Sensor Networks

• Authors: Habib M. Ammari;Sajal K. Das
• Venue: IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems
• Year: 2008

We prove that the energy sink-hole problem can be solved provided that sensors adjust their communication ranges so they can send data over distances less than the radii of their nominal communication range. This solution, however, imposes a severe restriction on the size of a monitored field. To overcome this limitation, we propose a sensor deployment strategy based on energy heterogeneity with a goal that all sensors deplete their energy simultaneously. Our simulation results show that such a sensor deployment strategy helps all sensors deplete their initial energy at the same time. To solve the energy sink-hole problem for homogeneous WSNs, however, where all sensors have the same initial energy, we propose a localized energy-aware Voronoi diagram-based data forwarding (EVEN) protocol. EVEN combines sink mobility with a new concept, called energy-aware Voronoi diagram whose virtual sites (i.e., virtual sensors' locations) are computed based on the remaining energy of the corresponding sensors. Through simulations, we show that EVEN outperforms similar greedy geographical data forwarding protocols and has performance that is comparable to that of an existing data collection protocol that uses a joint mobility and routing strategy. Precisely, we find that EVEN yields an improvement of more than in terms of network lifetime.