A method to prolong the lifetime of sensor networks by adding new sensor nodes to energy-consumed areas

A sensor network consists of a large number of sensor nodes which have sensing functions and wireless communication functions, and a single sink node which is a base station node of the sensor network. Sensor nodes sense some environmental phenomena and send data packets about the phenomena to the sink node by multi-hop communications. Generally sensor nodes are battery-driven. Therefore shortening battery power of a single sensor node gives negative effects to other sensor nodes whose data packets are relayed by the sensor node. Moreover it is practically impossible to exchange or recharge batteries of sensor nodes because of the large number of sensor nodes. (It is difficult to specify a deployed place where a sensor node whose battery becomes short exists.) In order to prolong the lifetime of sensor networks, this paper proposes a method where newly added sensor nodes are integrated with an original sensor network autonomously instead of exchanging or recharging batteries. Also this paper shows results on simulation experiments for evaluating the proposed method.