Increasing network lifetime by balancing node energy consumption in heterogeneous sensor networks

Sensor nodes are powered by battery and have severe energy constraints. The typical many-to-one traffic pattern causes uneven energy consumption among sensor nodes, that is, sensor nodes near the base station or a cluster head have much heavier traffic burden and run out of power much faster than other nodes. The uneven node energy dissipation dramatically reduces sensor network lifetime. In a previous work, we presented the chessboard clustering scheme to increase network lifetime by balancing node energy consumption. To achieve good performance and scalability, we propose to form a heterogeneous sensor network by deploying a few powerful high-end sensors in addition to a large number of low-end sensors. In this paper, we design an efficient routing protocol based on the chessboard clustering scheme, and we compute the minimum node density for satisfying a given lifetime constraint. Simulation experiments show that the chessboard clustering-based routing protocol balances node energy consumption very well and dramatically increases network lifetime, and it performs much better than two other clustering-based schemes. Copyright (C) 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.