Improving Lifetime in Maximum Residual Energy Routing With Increased Transmission Distance and Retransmission

In low power ad hoc wireless networks such as sensor network where nodes in the network are powered by battery with limited energy, it becomes critically important to improve the energy efficiency in the routing task in order to prolong the system lifetime. We propose a new model for energy utilization in wireless sensor networks by considering the tradeoff between increased transmission radius and retransmission energy cost to maintain a high level of successful packet reception rate. This model can be solved by a modified maximum residual energy path (MREP) algorithm. Based on this model, our simulation results show that lifetime is prolonged by increasing transmission radius while maintaining high reception rate through retransmission. Compared with the original model, the network energy usage distribution is more uniform in the new model and the result is an increase of 22% in system lifetime