Integrate Topology Control with Multi Path Routing to Enhance the Sensor Network Lifetime

In Wireless Sensor Networks, sensor nodes dissipate energy while sensing, processing, transmitting or receiving data to fulfil the mission required by the application. Measurements have shown that among of these major activities, a sensor node expends maximum energy in data communication. Since the sensor lifetime depends largely on the energy amount of its battery, consumption must be well controlled in order to maximize its lifetime after deployment. Topology control and energy efficient routing are among the most important energy conserving techniques in WSNs. However, research on the relation between topology control based sleep-scheduling and routing is very limited. In this paper, we propose a framework which integrates sleep scheduling-based topology control with multi path routing in order to exploit, more efficiently, the topology resulting after running any topology control protocol. A load balancing mechanism is adopted using a new metric that defines a priority for each path. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed framework in terms of Network lifetime, Energy consumption and Throughput.