On setting up energy-efficient paths with transmitter power control in wireless sensor networks

Energy-efficiency is an important design consideration of communication schemes for wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In this paper, we investigate the problem of energy-minimized sensor-to-sink communications with adaptive transmitter power settings. We devise a novel network-and application-aware model for this problem, and present a broadcast-on-update (BOU) solution. However, BOU suffers from the high overhead due to explosive broadcasting in path setup. We then show a waiting scheme, BOU-WA, that effectively mitigates the broadcast explosion. In BOU-WA, the waiting time before each broadcast is proportional to the probability that a node could find a more energy-efficient path to the sink. We provide an efficient approximation algorithm to calculate this probability. The performance of BOU-WA is evaluated under diverse network configurations, and the results demonstrate its superiority in conserving energy