Energy-balanced Parameter-adaptable Protocol Design in Cooperative Wireless Sensor Networks

The performance of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is adversely affected by the radio irregularity and fading effect. Cooperation is introduced into WSNs and serves as an effective way to combat fading effects. Meanwhile, sensor nodes having heavier burden than others result in the energy imbalance problem which remains harmful to the system lifetime. In this paper, we design a protocol for cooperative WSNs with energy balance consideration. Since the design of WSNs is highly dependent on application scenarios, the effects of system parameters are thoroughly analyzed and a unified criterion is established to choose the proper cooperative scheme. Moreover, energy balance is achieved by adjusting the size of clusters. We classify energy consumption into two groups: inter-cluster energy consumption and intra-cluster energy consumption. Sensor nodes consuming higher energy in inter-cluster data communication form smaller clusters. Thus energy consumption is balanced between intra- and inter-cluster data communication. The proposed energybalanced parameter-adaptable cooperative protocol (EBPACP) efficiently applies cooperation in cluster-based WSNs and balances energy consumption. A complete protocol design including the cluster formation, cooperative relationship buildup and data transmission are investigated thoroughly in this paper. Simulation results have shown that the proposed EBPACP provides good system performance in terms of energy efficiency and energy balance.