Energy consumption balancing in wireless sensors networks

Abstract

The management of energy in wireless sensors networks (wsn) is the main factor that can influence the lifespan of the network. To reduce the energy consumption, the transmission of data between sensor nodes must be reduced in order to preserve the remaining energy in every node. The nodes closest to the sink are critical nodes, they perform far more tasks than other nodes in wsn and consume a big amount of energy. Therefore, the resources of these nodes determine the lifetime of the whole network. To reduce the network traffic overhead and prolong the lifespan of the network we propose a new energy balancing architecture based on hexagonal clusters. In addition, the use of a mobile agent for each and every cluster and several sinks for the whole network can solve the problem of uneven energy consumption of both inter- and intra-cluster environments.