Fair Energy Allocation in Wireless Sensor Networks: Theory and Practice

This paper deals with the energy allocation in multi-hop wireless sensor networks. Because the traffic loads are not evenly distributed in a multi-hop wireless sensor network, different sensor nodes usually experience different energy consumption rates. The authors present Routing Independent Fair Energy-Allocation Scheme (RIFES), which allocates the available energy resource to a sensor node according to its pre-estimated traffic load. Because traffic load is the dominating source of energy consumption, RIFES optimizes the network's lifetime by equalizing all individual nodes' expected energy exhaustion times.