Energy-balanced multi-hop packet transmission in wireless sensor networks

This paper studies the problem of determining an energy-balanced schedule for packet transmission over a multi-hop communication path in wireless sensor networks. We consider an epoch-based scenario where the packet must be transmitted within a specified latency constraint. The goal is to balance the energy dissipation along the path with respect to a full exploration of the energy-latency tradeoffs. We propose both an off-line approximation algorithm and an on-line protocol. Experimental results show that by using our off-line algorithm, up to 90% energy saving ban be achieved with a 10-hop communication path with radius of each hop at 10 m, and 60% with radius of each hop at approximately 2.2 m. Two runtime scenarios are also shown to demonstrate the ability of the on-line protocol to adapt the modulation settings with respect to system variations in data packet size and latency constraint.