Adaptive Energy-Aware Transmission Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

A Wireless Sensor Network is composed of a large number of sensor nodes that are densely deployed either inside a phenomenon or very close to it [1]. A WSN enables wide range of applications; as a result it is receiving increasing research interest. The main challenge to researchers in the field of WSNs is to maintain a useful network lifetime under constrains imposed on the limited energy reserves that are inherent in the small, locally-powered sensor nodes. This research addresses this challenge through the development and evaluation of an information control, energy management and, transmission range adaptation algorithm which leads to an increased network lifetime. The contribution of this research is the development of an AIRT (Adaptive Information managed energy-aware algorithm for sensor networks with Rule managed reporting and Transmission Range Adjustments) or AIRT. The AIRT scheme increases the network lifetime at the possible sacrifices of often trivial data and further increase network lifetime through adapting transmission ranges based on nodes energy reserve level and message importance. The wireless sensor network environment was simulated using C Programming Language, where several runs of the simulation were performed in other to get reliable performance results. The performance results showed the advantage of the proposed AIRT scheme. Two different set of network statistics were measured; nodes energy resource depletion time and network connectivity. The results of each statistics of our technique were compared to the results of the statistics of similar works of recent researchers and our results show a significant improvement in network lifetime and connectivity (though not the focus of this research)