An Efficient Approach to Reduce the Energy Consumption in Wireless Sensor Networks through Active Nodes Optimization

A sensor network is made up of numerous small independent sensor nodes with sensing, processing and communicating capabilities. The sensor nodes have limited battery and a minimal amount of on-board computing power. This paper presents a novel methodology that utilizes source and path redundancy technique to effectively reduce the required energy consumption while at the same time maximize the lifetime of the sensor networks. In addition, the proposed methodology presents a strategy to optimize the number of active sensor nodes and assign equal time slots to each sensor nodes for sensing and communicating with the Base Station (BS). Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed methodology significantly minimizes the energy consumption and consequently increases the life time of the sensor nodes.