Abstract
Wireless sensor networks have been widely used in many fields with the developments of the related techniques. But there are many problems in traditional single sink sensor networks. The energy of the sensors near the sink or on the critical paths consumes too fast causing unbalanced energy consumption. The routing algorithms mainly focus on the nearest path or minimum hops. The invalidation of the single sink node causes the breakdown of the whole sensor network. In this paper, through the analysis of the disadvantages of single-sink sensor networks, we propose the system architecture of multi-sink sensor networks and a new routing algorithm Priority Based Routing (PBR) to balance the energy consumption of the sensor nodes in multi-sink sensor networks. Experiment results show PBR has better performances than traditional methods and prolongs the lifetime of the sensor networks.