Energy balancing in an OFDM-based WSN

The energy balancing is one of the main concerns in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Different from current methods, this paper attempts to solve the unbalanced energy consumption problem in the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) system for a WSN. The objective is to increase the sum throughput with almost equal energy consumption among the sensor nodes. Inspired by this goal, we formulated the optimization problem. Then a heuristic method is designed to solve this complex problem. The impact of number of subcarriers and sensor nodes on the fairness are studied in the numerical simulation. Comparisons with different common methods are made to show that the proposed method could achieve the excellent energy consumption fairness and better throughput.