Joint Balanced Routing and Energy Harvesting Strategy for Maximizing Network Lifetime in WSNs

Nowadays, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are becoming increasingly popular due to the wide variety of applications. The network can be utilized to collect and transmit numerous types of messages to a data sink in a many-to-one fashion. The WSNs usually contain sensors with low communication ability and limited battery power, and the battery replacement is difficult in WSNs for large amount embedded nodes, which indicates a balanced routing strategy is essential to be developed for an extensive operation lifecycle. To realize the goal, the research challenges require not only to minimize the energy consumption in each node but also to balance the whole WSNs traffic load. In this article, a Shortest Path Tree with Energy Balance Routing strategy (SPT-EBR) based on a forward awareness factor is proposed. In SPT-EBR, Two methods are presented including the power consumption and the energy harvesting schemes to select the forwarding node according to the awareness factors of link weight. First, the packet forwarding rate factor is considered in the power consumption scheme to update the link weight for the sensors with higher power consumption and mitigate the traffic load of hotspot nodes to achieve the energy balance network. With the assistance of the power consumption scheme, hotspot nodes can be transferred from the irregular location to the same intra-layer from the sink. Based on this feature, the energy harvesting scheme combines both the packet forwarding rate and the power charging rate factors together to update the link weight with a new battery charging rate factor for hotspot nodes. Finally, simulation results validate that both power consumption and energy harvesting schemes in SPT-EBR achieve better energy balance performance and save more charging power than the conventional shortest path algorithm and thus improve the overall network lifecycle.