Pipelined forwarding with energy balance in hexagonal wireless sensor networks

Abstract

This paper presents a pipelined forwarding scheme with energy balance for hexagonal wireless sensor networks (H-WSN). An H-WSN consists of hexagonal clusters in which the distance between any two cluster heads is p 3 R, where R is the radius of a hexagonal cluster. A trade-off exists in pipelined forwarding for an H-WSN; that is, reducing pipeline lengths can decrease data forwarding delay, but it will adversely increase the number of clusters, which consequently increases the total collecting time of a mobile sink. This paper therefore introduces a mobile sink data collecting and routing scheme to dynamically adjust the pipeline lengths and to periodically switch pipeline directions. With this mobile sink data collecting and routing, the overall system throughput is increased, and the energy consumptions among all cluster heads are balanced.