Energy efficiency in multi-sink linear sensor network with adjustable transmission range

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are applied to monitor linear systems. In these networks, multi-sinks energy harvesting modules are deployed, and battery-powered sensor nodes are deployed between the sinks. The main problem with these linear sensor networks is the unbalanced energy consumption of sensor nodes. In this paper, a novel transmission range adjustment method is proposed to solve this problem. At the clustering phase, we divide a long linear network into short linear networks, and the sinks are regarded as cluster heads. At the transmission phase, we adopt the Multidimensional Multiple-choice Knapsack Problem (MMKP) to resolve the route selection problem. The simulation results show the efficiency of the algorithm in balancing the energy consumption between the sensor nodes.