Energy-efficient tree-based message ferrying routing schemes for wireless sensor networks

• Published in: 2008 Third International Conference on Communications and Networking in China pp. 844 - 848
• Main Authors: Yi-hua Zhu, Wan-deng Wu, Leung, V.C.M., Liang-huai Yang
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.08.2008
• Subjects: Batteries; cluster-based routing; Delay; Educational institutions; Energy efficiency; Intelligent sensors; message ferrying routing; Mobile ad hoc networks; Partitioning algorithms; Power engineering and energy; Routing; Wireless sensor networks
• ISBN: 9781424423736; 1424423732
• DOI: 10.1109/CHINACOM.2008.4685156

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are prone to partitioning due to limited energy in sensor nodes and unreliable radio communications between them. Message ferrying (MF) has been proposed as an effective means to deliver data between separated parts of a partitioned WSN. In this paper, we propose a tree-based MF algorithm (TMFA), in which minimum-weight spanning trees of each partition of the WSN are evaluated with different alternate root nodes. Appropriate choice of the weights allows overall energy consumption or delay to be minimized. Two kinds of tree-constructing algorithms respectively named least energy tree (LET) and minimum hop tree (MHT) are presented and evaluated by deriving an energy model. For comparison, minimum spanning tree (MST) at a single root node and one level tree (OLT) that maximizes the use of the MF are considered. Simulation experiments show that LET and MHT outperform both MST and OLT when we take the message ferrypsilas moving cost into account.