Routing for wireless sensor networks lifetime maximisation under energy constraints

Power limitation is one of the main constraints in sensor networks. Different power-saving strategies are proposed in the literature, but most of them are mainly focusing on power saving rather than maximizing the network lifetime. Moreover, Energy consumption related to reception operations is generally not considered. In this paper, we propose a new power based routing strategy that maximizes the network lifetime. The main idea is to dynamically select routes according to the remaining available power on sensors and the required power for both the transmission and reception operations. The objective is to not focus on minimizing energy consumption, but to fairly distribute power consumption so that the lifetime of the whole sensor network is maximized. The scheme is detailed and modeled. It is a non-linear programming problem that we analyzed by simulations. Numerical results show that the proposed scheme converges to an optimal routing that maximizes the network lifetime. They also demonstrate that energy consumption linked to reception operations has an important effect on the network lifetime.