Energy - Efficient Routing Algorithms in Wireless Sensor Networks : e 3 D Diffusion vs . Clustering

One of the limitations of wireless sensor nodes is their inherent limited energy resource. Besides maximizing the lifetime of the sensor node, it is preferable to distribute the energy dissipated throughout the wireless sensor network in order to minimize maintenance and maximize overall system performance. Any communication protocol that involves synchronization of peer nodes incurs some overhead for setting up the communication. We introduce a new algorithm, e3D*, and compare it to two other algorithms, namely directed, and random clustering communication. We take into account the setup costs and analyze the energy-efficiency and the useful lifetime of the system. In order to better understand the characteristics of each algorithm and how well e3D really performs, we also compare e3D with its optimum counterpart and an optimum clustering algorithm. The benefit of introducing these ideal algorithms is to show the upper bound on performance at the cost of an astronomical prohibitive synchronization costs. We compare the algorithms in terms of system lifetime, power dissipation distribution, cost of synchronization, and simplicity of the algorithm. Our simulation results show that e3D performs only slightly worse than its optimal counterpart while having much less overhead. Therefore, our contribution is a diffusion based routing protocol that prolongs the system lifetime, evenly distributes the power dissipation throughout the network, and incurs minimal overhead for synchronizing communication.