Improving Network Efficiency by Removing Energy Holes in WSNs

Abstract: Cluster based Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have been widely used for better performance in terms of energy efficiency. Efficient use of energy is challenging task of designing these protocols. Energy holedare created due to quickly drain the energy of a few nodes due to non-uniform distribution in the network. Normally, energy holes make the data routing failure when nodes transmit data back to the base station. We proposedEnergy-efficient HOleRemoving Mechanism (E-HORM) technique to remove energy holes. In this technique, we use sleep and awake mechanism for sensor nodes to save energy. This approach finds the maximum distance node to calculate the maximum energy for data transmission. We considered it as a threshold energy Eth. Every node first checks its energy level for data transmission. If the energy level is less than Eth, it cannot transmit data. We also explain mathematically the energy consumption and average energy saving of sensor nodes in each round. Extensive simulations showed that when use this approach for WSNs significantly helps to extend the network lifetime and stability period.