An efficient wedge merging scheme for energy hole mitigation in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

In multi-hop Wireless Sensor Network (WSN), nodes closer to Base Station (BS) need to relay tra c from other nodes of the network which makes their energy depleted very fast and may cause an energy hole in the network. Moreover, energy consumption among nodes is not balanced due to non-uniform distribution of nodes and it causes some node to drain out their energy faster than other nodes in the network. In WSN, this energy hole problem plays a key factor to reduce the lifetime of the network as data cannot be sent from other sensor nodes to the BS although the residual energy in the network remains high. Some techniques to alleviate the energy hole problem include using a mobile sink, extending transmission range, and deploying redundant of the node near to the Sink. But the load of each node is still unbalanced and high energy consumption node die early. In order to reduce energy holes in the network, a new scheme WEMER based on WEdge MERging, is proposed here. In WEMER, the whole network is divided into many small equiangular wedges. When the residual energy of all the nodes within a wedge becomes less than 40% of their initial energy, thereby increasing the probability of energy holes creation, this wedge merges with the neighboring wedge to thwart the energy holes formation. Simulation results show that proposed scheme balances the energy consumption among nodes and achieves much longer lifetime than the contemporary schemes like Power E cient Gathering in Sensor Information Systems (PEGASIS) , Concentric Clustering Scheme (CCS) and Multilayer Cluster Designing Algorithm (MCDA). xi