A Performance Survey and Simulated Residual Energy of Sensor Nodes in a Typical Wireless Sensor Network

This paper is a performance survey on the residual energy of nodes in a wireless sensor network (WSN). Wireless sensor nodes are limited in application due to constraints in energy of nodes’ battery and addressing the problem of energy management is essential to lengthen the life of a deployed network of wireless sensors. In the method used, Sensor nodes were equally distributed on the complete border of the network field. An exclusive cluster, six hierarchical, and eighteen hierarchical clusters were formed based on even partition of the border of the network field. The choice of Cluster Head (CH) within each cluster formed was based on selection of a sensor node with minimal transmission distance to the Base Station. A comparison of the various hierarchical scenarios was simulated in MATLAB. The mean residue energies (MREs) after the network lifetime are 3%, 52%, and 35% of the initial node energy for single, six and eighteen hierarchical clusters respectively. The residual energies of sensor nodes above the recorded MREs were taken on a class interval of 50’s of the node identity (nid) and respective averages of residual energies of sensor nodes (AEr) of each selected class interval were evaluated. Based on the result, certain categories of sensor nodes at a section of the network field indicated that the battery energy of the affected nodes was not maximally utilized thereby leading to enormous residual energy. It was concluded that the residual energy of nodes in a WSN could be optimized to extend the lifetime.