Cross-layer aware routing approach for lifetime maximization in wireless sensor networks with multiple sinks

Graduation date: 2013In wireless sensor networks (WSNs) nodes are battery powered. Therefore, the available\ud energy resources of sensor nodes should be managed efficiently in order to increase\ud the network lifetime. As a result, researchers have proposed routing schemes in order to\ud maximize network lifetime. Even though these schemes increase the network lifetime,\ud the majority of these schemes do not account for MAC contention constraints associated\ud with the shared medium. Consequently, the rates of the flows obtained by solving\ud the routing schemes might not be feasible in practice. Recently, cross-layer aware routing\ud approaches were proposed for WSNs that increase the network lifetime and insure\ud the feasibility of the routing solutions. However, these approaches are proposed for\ud WSNs with single sink. In this paper, we extend this problem into a multi-sink case. To\ud maximize the network lifetime and to ensure the feasibility of the routing solution, we propose a cross layer aware routing approach that (i) accounts for MAC and network layers, (ii) maximizes the network lifetime, and (iii) is applicable for WSNs with multiple\ud sinks. One of the sufficient conditions, referred to as rate-based constraints is incorporated\ud into our routing formulation in order to guarantee medium access feasibility\ud of the routing solutions. Simulation results show that our routing approach for networks\ud with multiple sinks achieves longer lifetime and better solution feasibility compared to\ud the approach proposed for networks with single sink