Distributed transmission power control for network programming in wireless sensor networks

In wireless sensor networks, the necessity of network programming becomes more and more important due to the inaccessibility of the sensor nodes. Because the network programming produces a large amount of data, it consumes a great deal of energy and causes the network to suffer from much interference. Many conventional studies regarding the network programming attempted to reduce the energy consumption and the interference effect. However, they overlook transmission power effect on the energy-efficiency and the interference problem. In this paper, we present a novel network programming protocol that controls the transmission power at each sender node in a distributed manner. The protocol deals not only with the energy consumption of individual sensor node but also the network load distribution. Moreover, it reduces the interference effect on the network by decreasing the average transmission power of the sensor nodes. We verify that our protocol extends the lifetime of the sensor network and decreases the packet losses through simulation results.