A power allocation method with maximum Effective Configuration Duration in wireless sensor networks

This paper investigates a simple and effective power allocation method to maximize the Effective Configuration Duration (ECD) in wireless sensor networks, which aims to minimize the signaling overhead needed to perform relay nodes selection, Cooperative Set update and power allocation, resulting in obvious power saving and lifetime extension. Compared with traditional allocation schemes, this method jointly considers the residual energy of sensors and the mean of channel power gains, thus limits the feedback burden and increases the topology stability. Two classical power allocation methods are evaluated for comparison, and numerical results show that the proposed scheme can significantly extend ECD over a wide range of parameter values.