A Fair Energy Conserving Routing Algorithm for Wireless Sensor Networks

Energy conservation is a critical issue in wireless sensor networks. We formulate the energy conserving routing problem as a nonlinear program, whose objective is to maximize the network lifetime until the first node battery drains out. We prove the nonlinear program can be converted to an equivalent maximum multi-commodity concurrent flow problem and develop an iterative approximation algorithm based on a revised shortest path scheme. Then we discuss the feasibility, precision and computation complexity of the algorithm through theoretic analysis, some optimization methods are also provided to reduce the algorithm running time. Performance simulation and comparison show the effectiveness of the algorithm.