Joint optimization of energy allocation and routing problems in wireless sensor networks

Energy allocation problems and routing problems are both important research issues in the wireless sensor network (WSN) field. The former usually aims at considering how to allocate a certain number of sensor devices in a sensing region to form a WSN so that the objective function value (e.g., the network connectivity or the network lifetime) of the constructed network is optimized. For the message routing problem in WSNs, researchers tend to consider how to find an energy conservable message transmission routing scheme for notifying the supervisor of the WSN when an event occurs. Till now, many solutions have been proposed for the above two categories of optimization problems. However, unifying the above two network optimization problems to maximize the network lifetime, to the best of our knowledge, still lacks related research. This paper considers a joint optimization problem for energy allocation and energy‐aware routing called the joint optimization of energy allocation and routing problem (JOEARP) for a hierarchical cluster‐based WSN. We propose an exact algorithm to provide the optimum solution for the JOEARP. The simulation results show that this solution performed better in prolonging the network lifetime of a WSN in a real situation, compared to other compositions of conventional energy allocation schemes with some known routing algorithms. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.