Centralized Routing for Prolonged Network Lifetime in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract: In this thesis centralized routing methods for wireless sensor networks have been studied. The aim has been to prolong network lifetime by reducing the energy consumed by sensor-node communication.Wireless sensor networks are rapidly becoming common in application areas where information from many sensors is to be collected and acted upon. The use of wireless sensor networks adds flexibility to the network, and the cost of cabling can be avoided.Wireless sensor networks may consist of several hundreds of small devices, equipped with sensors (e.g. acoustic, seismic or image) that form a wireless network. Each sensor node collects information from its surroundings and sends it to a base station, either from sensor node to sensor node, or directly to the base station.We have made simulations that show that asymmetric communication with multihop extends the lifetime of large wireless sensor networks. We have also investigated the usefulness of enforcing a minimum separation distance between cluster heads in a cluster based wireless sensor network. The results show that our sensor network performs up to 150% better when introducing a minimum separation distance between cluster heads. The simulations also show that the minimum separation distance resulting in the lowest energy consumption in our network varies with the number of clusters. We have also made an initial study of maximum lifetime routing in sparse wireless sensor networks to be able to see how different heuristic routing algorithms influence the energy consumption of individual sensor nodes, and thus the lifetime of a sparse sensor network. We have also compared the maximum lifetime of the heuristic algorithms to the maximum lifetime of an optimal routing solution. These simulations showed that for some types of applications the choice of heuristic algorithm is more important to prolong network lifetime, than for other types of applications.