The distinctive design characteristic of a wireless sensor network: the energy map

The key challenge in the design of a wireless sensor network is maximizing its lifetime. This is a fundamental problem and new protocol engineering principles need to be established in order to achieve this goal. The information about the amount of available energy in each part of the network is called the energy map and can be useful to increase the lifetime of the network. In this paper, we propose using the energy map as a protocol engineering principle for this kind of network. We argue that an energy map can be the basis for the entire design trajectory including all functionalities to be included in a wireless sensor network. Furthermore, we show how to construct an energy map using both probabilistic and statistical prediction-based approaches. Simulation results compare the performance of these approaches with a naive one in which no prediction is used. The experiments performed use an energy dissipation model that we have proposed to simulate the behavior of a sensor node in terms of energy consumption. The results show that prediction-based approaches outperform the naive in a variety of parameters. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.