Studies on the Performance of Energy Efficient Techniques and its Improvement in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) play a vital role in the innovations of industrial control and surveillance. Sensor networks connect together tiny low variant power sensors with limited resources such as memory, processor and battery powered energy when compared with conventional computing devices. This ensures that sensor networks are easily formed but become more complex in both hardware and software. There are some issues in the communication protocol at the Network, Transport and Medium Access Control Layers. Other issues arise in applications that require coverage, localization, fast mobility, security, data aggregation and replication. These requirements can be easily met through various techniques but they lead to difficulty in maintenance of energy storage of the sensor nodes and hence reduction in network life time. newlineThe energy consumption of the sensor nodes is from the battery power when performing operations such as sensing, receiving, identifying and forwarding to the sink in the different layers of the protocol stack. Most of all, the energy of each node is consumed for the communication between the sink node and source node that may be far away. Thus, the choices of the routing protocols should be very effective and consume the least energy. Also, the formation of clusters in the sensor networks must be energy efficient and support enhanced routing protocols for multi-hop features. In existing routing protocols, some of the nodes are relentlessly involved in forwarding the packets and as a result, more energy will be drained in these nodes. Hence, such nodes die much earlier than other nodes causing interruption in the network. newlineThe correct cluster head selection reduces energy consumption significantly and enhances the lifetime of the WSN. The choice of cluster heads is a crucial step in cluster-based algorithms and seriously affect the performance of the clustering algorithm.