Benefits of Multiple Battery Levels for the Lifetime of Large Wireless Sensor Networks.

In large wireless sensor networks, the few nodes close to the monitoring station are likely to prove the bottleneck in the useful lifetime of the network. We examine a strategy of equipping these nodes with a larger share of the total initial energy (battery) than the others, and generalizing this notion to the rest of the network. We solve a design problem involving optimizing the network lifetime using no more than a given number of distinct battery levels, and verify the results from the model by direct simulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]