Mike Dixon

Wireless communication is the major energy consumer compared to computation and sensing operations performed by a battery-powered wireless sensor node. The reduction of communication power consumption in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) can be achieved using adaptive transmission power adjustment paradigms. Although transmission reliability can be enhanced further by transmitting route discovery messages and data packets at unnecessarily high transmission power outputs, this may introduce excessive interference and collisions and wastes energy.

Recent studies on a reliable energy efficient routing in multihop wireless sensor networks have shown a great reliance on radio channel quality in route selection decisions. If sensor nodes along the routing path and closer to the base station present a high quality link to forwarding upstream packets, these sensor nodes will experience a faster depletion rate in their residual energy levels. This results in a topological bottleneck or network partitioning. In this extended abstract, we present an empirical study on how to improve energy efficiency for reliable multihop communications by integrating additional useful information from different layers: e.g., residual energy level, link quality, and hop count. The proposed approach aims to balance the workload among relay nodes to achieve a balanced energy usage, thereby maximizing the operational network lifetime. The obtained results are presented from prototype real-network experiments based on the Mica2 (MPR400) wireless sensor platform developed by Crossbow Technologies Inc.