LAUSR

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and Internet of Things domain comprise of numerous small sized battery powered sensor nodes. Energy efficiency and energy balancing are very important aspects from the perspective of increasing the lifespan of WSN. Energy balancing is more important in case of multi-hop networks with many-to-one communication pattern as the nodes which are closer to the sink have more relay load than the other nodes. In this work, we present a detailed discussion on the different energy balancing approaches with a detailed analysis of each. The discussion is further accompanied by a detailed analytical comparison of the approaches. Further, this study presents a detailed analytical discussion and comparative study of the different energy balancing schemes based on mixed-hop transmission. Mixed transmissions, where each node selects between cheap hop-by-hop transmission and costly direct transmissions, is a reasonable approach to achieve balanced energy consumption. Besides, the paper also throws some light on the various issues and challenges present in the domain of mixed-hop energy balancing. It also mentions few research directions which can be focused upon to carry further research in this domain.