Extending the lifetime of wireless sensor networks: A hybrid routing algorithm

Power-aware routing in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) focuses on the crucial problem of extending the network lifetime of WSNs, which are limited by low-capacity batteries. However, most of the contemporary works fail to resolve the hotspot problem, which is the isolation of the sink node due to the power exhaustion of sink close-by nodes. In this paper we propose a solution to address this issue through a hybrid approach that combines two routing strategies, flat multi-hop routing and hierarchical multi-hop routing. The former aims to minimize the total power consumption in the network, and the latter attempts to decrease the amount of traffic by utilizing data compression. We mathematically analyze the power consumption of our proposed algorithm, then we demonstrate through extensive simulations that the proposed scheme is able to extend the network lifetime by alleviating the hotspot problem. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.