Toward Energy-Efficient and Robust Large-Scale WSNs: A Scale-Free Network Approach

Due to the limited battery power of sensor nodes and harsh deployment environment, it is of fundamental importance and a great challenge to achieve high energy efficiency and strong robustness in large-scale wireless sensor networks (LS-WSNs). To this end, we propose two self-organizing schemes for LS-WSNs. The first scheme is the energy-aware common neighbor scheme, which considers the neighborhood overlap in link establishment. The second scheme is energy-aware low potential-degree common neighbor (ELDCN) scheme, which considers both neighborhood overlap in topology formation and the potential degrees of common neighbors. Both schemes generate clustering-based and scale-free-inspired LS-WSNs, which are energy-efficient and robust. However, the ELDCN scheme shows higher energy efficiency and stronger robustness to node failures, because it avoids establishing links to hub-nodes with high potential connectivity. Analytical and simulation results demonstrate that our proposed schemes outperform the existing scale-free evolution models in terms of energy efficiency and robustness.