Title: Prolonging the system lifetime and equalising the energy for heterogeneous sensor networks using RETT protocol

Authors: Khaled Matrouk, Bjorn Landfeldt

Addresses: School of Computer Engineering and Information Technology, Al-Hussein Bin Talal University, Ma'an 20, Jordan. ' School of Information Technologies, The University of Sydney, Sydney 2006, Australia

Abstract: In some Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) deployments, nodes may be used for different purposes (sensing, data pre-processing, actuation, etc.). Even if such a network is organised into clusters, this creates heterogeneity in terms of energy capability, which needs to be managed and balanced in order to ensure proper sensing capability with maximised lifespan. In this paper, we present Routing based on Energy-Temperature Transformation (RETT), a protocol that transforms the expected lifetime of each node into an equivalent temperature, and then by using the heat conduction formulas, finds the hottest path for sending data to a data sink in order to equalise the residual energy throughout the WSN. We investigate RETT|s ability to cope with heterogeneity and investigate its resilience and scalability based on node density and network size through a simulation study. We find that RETT is well suited to managing energy in the heterogeneous WSN case.

Keywords: heterogeneous sensor networks; efficient routing; distributed algorithms; node lifetime; wireless sensor networks; WSNs; RETT protocol; simulation; wireless networks.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSNET.2009.029015

International Journal of Sensor Networks, 2009 Vol.6 No.2, pp.65 - 77

Published online: 26 Oct 2009 *

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