Energy-efficient flow control and routing for clustered wireless sensor networks

In clustered wireless sensor networks, a numerous work for energy efficient routing has been conducted. These works are mainly focused on the decision of energy efficient routing between clusters. In this paper, we change a view of clustered network to a set of 'cluster-rings'. A cluster-ring is the doughnut-shaped set of clusters which is placed roughly same distance from sink node. First, we decide the amount of 'data flow' to be forwarded between the 'cluster-rings', rather than between the 'clusters'. After the proportion of data flow is decided, the routing between clusters in two cluster-rings is performed. In short, traditional concept of routing between clusters is transformed into the flow control of cluster-ring and routing of clusters between cluster-rings. As an initial work to realize this new concept, we propose a flow control algorithm, called AFC, and routing algorithm named FA-C. AFC uses the technique of reinforcement algorithm to decide near-optimal data flow. FA-C adopts effective shortest cost path metric to select the relay node which is actually forwards the data to the sink node. The simulation results show that the performance of proposed algorithms asymptotically approaches that of optimal result. The proposed algorithm performs well under different energy efficiency criteria and adapts well under dynamic traffic change. The parallel execution of the proposed algorithm improves the speed of convergence significantly.