Stochastic Models and Adaptive Algorithms for Energy Balance in Sensor Networks

We consider the important problem of energy balanced data propagation in wireless sensor networks and we extend and generalize previous works by allowing adaptive energy assignment. We consider the data gathering problem where data are generated by the sensors and must be routed toward a unique sink. Sensors route data by either sending the data directly to the sink or in a multi-hop fashion by delivering the data to a neighbouring sensor. Direct and neighbouring transmissions require different levels of energy consumption. Basically, the protocols balance the energy consumption among the sensors by computing the adequate ratios of direct and neighbouring transmissions. An abstract model of energy dissipation as a random walk is proposed, along with rigorous performance analysis techniques. Two efficient distributed algorithms are presented and analyzed, by both rigorous means and simulation. The first one is easy to implement and fast to execute. The protocol assumes that sensors know a-priori the rate of data they generate. The sink collects and processes all these information in order to compute the relevant value of the protocol parameter. This value is transmitted to the sensors which individually compute their optimal ratios of direct and neighbouring transmissions. The second protocol avoids the necessary a-priori knowledge of the data rate generated by sensors by inferring the relevant information from the observation of the data paths. Furthermore, this algorithm is based on stochastic estimation methods and is adaptive to environmental change

Energy Balanced Strategies for Maximizing the Lifetime of Sparsely Deployed Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks

Underwater acoustic sensor networks (UWA-SNs) are envisioned to perform monitoring tasks over the large portion of the world covered by oceans. Due to economics and the large area of the ocean, UWA-SNs are mainly sparsely deployed networks nowadays. The limited battery resources is a big challenge for the deployment of such long-term sensor networks. Unbalanced battery energy consumption will lead to early energy depletion of nodes, which partitions the whole networks and impairs the integrity of the monitoring datasets or even results in the collapse of the entire networks. On the contrary, balanced energy dissipation of nodes can prolong the lifetime of such networks. In this paper, we focus on the energy balance dissipation problem of two types of sparsely deployed UWA-SNs: underwater moored monitoring systems and sparsely deployed two-dimensional UWA-SNs. We first analyze the reasons of unbalanced energy consumption in such networks, then we propose two energy balanced strategies to maximize the lifetime of networks both in shallow and deep water. Finally, we evaluate our methods by simulations and the results show that the two strategies can achieve balanced energy consumption per node while at the same time prolong the networks lifetime