Prolong the lifetime of wireless sensor network with dichotomy power control

Abstract

Conserving energy so as to maximize the postdeployment active lifetime of wireless sensor networks has been one of the key challenges to unlock the potential data gathering sensor networks. One of the approaches to achieve the goal is to make the collaborative strategies on packet transmission and relaying energy efficient. However, the impact of traffic load in the lifetime of sensor networks are not considered in most of the previous research works in this area. In this paper we analyze and illustrate that some heavy traffic sensor nodes, which significantly shorten the network lifetime in the unevenly distributed traffic environments, may determine the lifetime of a sensor network. Thus we propose a dichotomy transmission power control scheme to prolong the lifetime of large-scale wireless sensor networks, which is adaptive to the traffic over the nodes and the distance of the nodes to the sink. Simulation in MATLAB can efficiently improve the lifetime performance of large-scale sensor networks.