Minimizing the total range with two power levels in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Minimizing the total energy consumed by wireless sensor network (WSN) is a significant problem, since the sensor nodes are attached with a small battery of restricted capacity. In a WSN, any pair of sensor nodes must be able to communicate with each other in the network, so bidirectional connectivity of WSN is an important characteristic to be achieved. The range assignment problem in a WSN aims to assign transmission range to each sensor node of the network such that the specified connectivity constraints such as strong connectivity, k-connectivity are to be satisfied by the reduced network. Most sensors in recent days operate with discrete power levels. So, in this paper, we consider the range assignment problem with two power levels. Our aim is to assign each sensor node in the network with one of the available set of power levels such that the reduced topology is strongly connected and the total power consumption is minimized. The dual power assignment problem is well studied in the literature. We present an improved algorithm for dual power assignment problem in which the power levels are taken as input. Performance of the proposed algorithms is analyzed through extensive simulation. We establish the theoretical approximation ratio bound of the proposed algorithm for dual power assignment problem as 2. But, the simulation results indicate that the performance ratio is much less than 2. © 2019, Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.