An analytical model for the energy hole problem in many-to-one sensor networks
Jian Li, Pradyumna Kumar Mohapatra · 2006
In a many-to-one sensor network, all sensor nodes generate CBR data and send them to a single sink via multihop transmissions. Sensor nodes sitting around the sink need to relay more traffic and suffer much faster energy consumption rates (ECR), and thus have much shorter expected lifetime. This may result in severe consequences such as early dysfunction of the entire network. While this phenomenon was reported previously in the existing literature, there is a lack of an analytical model on the characteristics of this issue. In this paper we present a mathematical model and characterize the energy hole problem. Using our model, we investigate the effectiveness of some existing approaches towards mitigating this problem in a formal manner. We have used simulation results to validate our analysis.