Energy Efficient Techniques in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks ( WSNs) were predicted to invade all domains in our daily newlinelives in the near future, due to their rapid and promising growth. In a WSN, the small newlinesize of sensors makes their use very subtle and suitable for obscure observations. Their newlinesize also makes it easy to drop them by plane into a specified area. Sensors may be newlineinstalled to track traffic inside a congested city. These can be used to track animal newlinemigration patterns. When a chemical factory is leaking poisonous gases, WSN can newlinetrack the movement and scale of the fume cloud. The location of a sniper can be newlinedetected from the blast noise of the rifle by the deployed sensors in a town field. newlineHowever, solutions must be sought to certain problems in order to achieve their maturity, newlinewhich slows down the widespread use of these networks. The activity done by WSN that consumes the most energy is the number of packets sent/received. Direct newlinepropagation, chain formation, cluster creation are various techniques by which data is communicated by sensor nodes to the sink. It has been proved that Clustering is an newlineefficient and scalable method to utilize the energy of sensor nodes efficiently. Optimal newlineelection of cluster heads is an NP (non deterministic polynomial time)-Hard problem. newlineAnother major problem is that number of long distance transmissions should be minimized so as to reduce the data routing cost. Single hop clustering suffers from energy hole/hot-spot problem. newline