Transmission Range Assignment with Balancing Connectivity in Clustered Wireless Networks

Currently, the main challenge for researchers in the field of wireless sensor networks is associated with reducing the energy consumption as much as possible to increase the lifetime of the nodes and improve the performance of the network. Furthermore, delivery of data to its destination is also an important key issue that represents throughput of the network. On the other hand, transmission range assignment in clustered wireless networks is the bottleneck of the balance between energy conservation and the connectivity to deliver a given size of data to the sink or gateway. Therefore, this research aims to optimize the energy consumption through reducing the transmission ranges of the backbone nodes in multihop network, while maintaining high probability to get end -to- end connectivity to the network’s data sink or gateway. Hence, this framework will decrease the energy used for the transmissions made by cluster head nodes, and improve the efficiency of the current clustering protocols that usually use huge transmission ranges for cluster heads (CHs) backbone in wireless sensor networks. We modified the approach given in [1] to achieve more than 30% power saving through reducing CH-transmissions of the backbone network nodes in a multihop wireless sensor network with ensuring at least 95% connectivity probability. Keywords: Wireless sensor networks; Adaptive transmission ranges; Clustering; Network topology.