Investigation of the interplay between data correlation and lifetime in wireless sensor networks through linear programming

The application of wireless sensor networks increased due to the production of inexpensive wireless sensors with the advances at the electronics. Sensors became to be widely used because they can operate at remote places under different conditions without having an infrastructure. On the other hand, power constraints of the sensors is a very important aspect at the design and applications of wireless sensor networks also because of these features. There are some routing algorithms and protocols that are developed for the optimization of network lifetime and effective usage of energy at the sensors. It is important to route the traffic through the network and split equally between sensors for achieving longer sensor lifetimes. Maintaining longer wireless sensor lifetime is an optimization problem and linear programming is widely used as a solution of the optimization problems. Hence, linear programming is used in this study for lifetime optimization of wireless sensor networks considering correlation between data produced from sensors. Simulation results show that, linear programming provides better lifetimes compared to the systems that only use flow optimization strategies when correlation is considered.