Fair Energy Allocation in Wireless Sensor Networks: Theory and Practice

This paper deals with the energy allocation in multi-hop wireless sensor networks. Because the traffic loads are not evenly distributed in a multi-hop wireless sensor network, different sensor nodes usually experience different energy consumption rates. We present Routing Independent Fair Energy-Allocation Scheme (RIFES), which allocates the available energy resource to a sensor node according to its pre-estimated traffic load. Because traffic load is the dominating source of energy consumption, RIFES optimizes the network´s lifetime by equalizing all individual nodes´ expected energy exhaustion times. Due to the fact that a node´s real experienced traffic load may differ to its pre-estimated traffic load in practice, it is hard for RIFES to achieve its theoretical optimal performance. To bridge this gap between theory and practice, this paper also presents several distributed routing algorithms, the use of which prolongs the network´s lifetime by balancing the real-experienced traffic loads among neighboring nodes.