A Study on the Bottleneck Power-Aware Many-to-One Routing Problem for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Since the operations of sensors in a wireless sensor network mainly rely on battery power, power consumption becomes an important issue. To extend the network’s lifetime, many power-aware routing protocols have been designed to evenly distribute packet-relaying loads among nodes to prevent the overuse and abuse of battery power of any node. In this paper, we will consider the problem of searching for multiple routing paths between multiple source sensors and the single sink in a wireless sensor network such that the maximum of all the node’s power consumptions is as small as possible. We will first show such a problem to be NP-complete. Next, based on Dijkstra’s algorithm, an efficient heuristic algorithm is developed for the difficult problem. Computer simulations verify that the suboptimal solutions generated by our heuristic algorithm are very close to the optimal ones obtained by linear programming techniques.