A mixed transmission strategy to achieve energy balancing in wireless sensor networks

In this paper, we investigate the problem of energy balanced data collection in wireless sensor networks, aiming to balance energy consumption among all sensor nodes during the data propagation process. Energy balanced data collection can potentially save energy consumption and prolong network lifetime, and hence, it has many practical implications for sensor network design and deployment. The traditional hop-by-hop transmission model allows a sensor node to propagate its packets in a hop-by-hop manner toward the sink, resulting in poor energy balancing for the entire network. To address the problem, we apply a slice-based energy model, and divide the problem into inter-slice and intra-slice energy balancing problems. We then propose a probability-based strategy named inter-slice mixed transmission protocol and an intra-slice forwarding technique to address each of the problems. We propose an energy-balanced transmission protocol by combining both techniques to achieve total energy balancing. In addition, we study the condition of switching between inter-slice transmission and intra-slice transmission, and the limitation of hops in an intra-slice transmission. Through our extensive simulation studies, we demonstrate that the proposed protocols achieve energy balancing, prolong network lifespan, and decrease network delay, compared with the hop-by-hop transmission and a cluster-based routing protocol under various parameter settings.