Energy consumption in wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) can be used to collect surrounding data by multi-hop. As sensor networks have the constrained and not rechargeable energy resource, energy efficiency is an important design issue for its topology. In this paper, the energy consumption issue under the different topology is studied. We derive the exact mathematical expression of energy consumption for the flat and clustering scheme, respectively. Then the energy consumptions of different schemes are compared. By the comparison, multi-level clustering scheme is more energy efficient in large scale networks. Simulation results demonstrate that our analysis is correct from the view of prolonging the large-scale network lifetime and achieving more power reductions.