The Energy Hole Problem in Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks

In a multi-hop wireless sensor network(WSN),the sensors closer to the sink tend to deplete their energy faster than other sensors,which is known as an energy hole to form around the sink.No more data can be delivered to the sink after an energy hole appears,while a considerable amount of energy is wasted and the network lifetime ends prematurely.This paper investigates the energy hole problem.Based on the corona model,some long-range links are added to extend the network lifetime.Different from the existing algorithms,data transmission is permitted from C1 to Ci.So data are concentrated in Ci.Then some long-range links are added in Ci.Because there have more nodes in Ci than that in C1,which ensures balanced energy-usage among nodes in the network.Theoretical analysis and the experiments show that the method can greatly extend the network lifetime.