Abstract: Wireless sensor networks play vital role in data gathering. They often work in hostile environments where nodes are not having any energy refilling. Therefore the lifetimes of network and energy consumption are very important. The aim of any technique is to increase lifetime of the network with optimizations. The rationale behind this is that the network has sensor nodes that are resource constrained. In this paper we proposed a model used to determine the effects of energy hole and estimate network lifetime in presence of energy hole at sink. Energy hole is characterized and studied in order to find its effect on the lifetime of the network. We used NS2 simulations in order to evaluate our work. The experimental results revealed that the proposed model is useful to determine the life time of WSN.

Keywords: Wireless Sensor Network (WSN), energy hole, routing, network lifetime, energy efficiency.