ARTICLE IN PRESS JID: ADHOC [m5G;November 3, 2016;13:28] Ad Hoc Networks 000 (2016) 1–17 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Ad Hoc Networks journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/adhoc An adaptive energy balanced and energy efficient approach for data gathering in wireless sensor networks J. Kulshrestha * , M.K. Mishra Department of Computer Engineering and Applications, GLA University, India a r t i c l e i n f o Article history: Received 19 July 2015 Revised 25 October 2016 Accepted 31 October 2016 Available online xxx Keywords: Wireless sensor network Routing Energy-efficiency Energy balanced data transmission Mixed hop transmission schemes a b s t r a c t Energy efficiency and energy balancing are the most stringent needs of wireless sensor network for pro- longing its lifetime. As direct transmissions are costly, multi-hop approach is often used to collect the data of the nodes at the sink. However, many-to-one communication pattern in multi-hop communica- tion may result in an unbalanced energy consumption in the network. Nodes closer to the sink deplete their energy at a faster rate than nodes that are further away. Mixed transmission approach, where each node trades-off between the cheaper hop-by-hop transmission and costlier direct transmission, is a good solution for balancing energy consumption. This paper proposes a receiver contention based mixed trans- mission scheme for energy balancing. In addition to distance and residual energy of the receivers, it also considers the link reliability and the number of neighboring nodes, in setting of the timer that will deter- mine the relay node selection. The proposed approach gives more efficient and effective energy balanced data transmission as compared with the other works proposed in the literature. Its performance is evalu- ated and presented both analytically and through simulations, and the analytical estimations are validated by the simulation results. The simulation results show a significant improvement over the other closely related approaches. Moreover, the proposed approach can be easily used with both uniform as well as non-uniform node deployment. © 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) consist of very small, low-cost and low-power nodes. These nodes are capable of sensing various types of physical or environmental phenomenon like temperature, pressure, humidity, light, radiation, vibration, seismic waves, pres- ence of some biological organism(s), etc. These nodes also have processing and communication capabilities. Due to their characteristic features, sensor networks have a broad range of applications like environment monitoring, battle- field surveillance, patient/elderly people monitoring, monitoring and control of production process in industries, condition moni- toring, creating smart homes, vehicle tracking and detection, etc [1]. The sensor nodes have limited memory and processing capacity. Therefore, these nodes collect the data and send it to some base station or sink for processing. The nodes also possess a constrained battery power. Apart from this, a lot of applications of WSN require sensor nodes to be deployed in hostile environments, where it is * Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: jagrati.kulshrestha@gla.ac.in (J. Kulshrestha), manas.mishra @gla.ac.in (M.K. Mishra). difficult to replace or recharge the batteries. For example, in case of environment/habitat monitoring, the sensor nodes are deployed in forests; in case of battlefield surveillance, they are deployed in bat- tlefields; in case of process surveillance/monitoring, sensor nodes can be deployed inside boilers, radioactive tanks, etc. In all these hostile environments it is not possible to replace or recharge the batteries of the sensor nodes. Hence, the available energy needs to be conserved so that the network remains operational for a long time. Further, the energy consumed in communication is more sig- nificant than the energy consumed in computations [2,3]. Hence, energy efficient routing approaches are needed to minimize com- munication cost. Energy efficiency and energy balancing are two major factors for prolonging the network lifetime. Energy efficiency aims at min- imizing the energy consumption of the nodes or of the network as a whole. Energy balancing ensures that the average energy con- sumption is uniform among all the nodes. Approaches targeting energy efficiency might use the nodes on energy efficient path re- peatedly and thus, those nodes will be exhausted early. In addition, due to many-to-one communication pattern, nodes near the sink are prone to die faster, even if the individual path is energy effi- cient. This is due to the fact that these nodes have additional relay burden of forwarding the data from the nodes further away on the http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.adhoc.2016.10.013 1570-8705/© 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Please cite this article as: J. Kulshrestha, M.K. Mishra, An adaptive energy balanced and energy efficient approach for data gathering in wireless sensor networks, Ad Hoc Networks (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.adhoc.2016.10.013