An efficient routing technique that maximizes the lifetime and coverage of wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) have become very popular in the last few years. One key issue about WSN is that sensor nodes have a limited battery capacity. For that, it is important to develop energy efficient solutions to keep these networks functioning for the longest period of time. Since most of the nodes energy is spent on data transmission, for that many routing techniques have been proposed to expand the network lifetime such as the Online Maximum Lifetime heuristics (OML) and capacity maximization (CMAX). The OML has obtained the best lifetime in the literature. In this paper, we introduce an efficient routing power management heuristic to gain higher lifetime and increased coverage by managing the power at the node level. We accomplished that by dividing the node energy into two ratios; one for the sensor node originated data (α) and the other part is for data relays from other sensors (β). This heuristic, which is called ERPMT (Efficient Routing Power Management Technique), has been applied to OML and CMAX. Results from running extensive simulation runs revealed the superiority of the new methodology ERPMT over existing heuristics. The ERPMT increases the lifetime up to 56.7% in the best case, which is achieved when α = 50% of total energy.