Fair Routing for Overlapped Cooperative Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks

In recent years, as wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are widely diffused, multiple overlapping WSNs constructed on the same area become more common. In such a situation, their lifetime is expected to be extended by cooperative packet forwarding. Although some researchers have studied about cooperation in multiple WSNs, most of them do not consider the heterogeneity in the characteristics of each WSN such as battery capacity, operation start time, the number of nodes, nodes locations, energy consumption, packet size and/or data transmission timing, and so on. In a heterogeneous environment, naive lifetime improvement with cooperation may not be fair. In this paper, we propose a fair cooperative routing method for heterogeneous overlapped WSNs. It introduces an energy pool to maintain the total amount of energy consumption by cooperative forwarding. The energy pool plays a role of broker for fair cooperation. Finally, simulation results show the excellent performance of the proposed method.