In wireless sensor network, nodes are powered by battery with limited
energy, it becomes critically important to improve the energy efficiency
in routing in order to prolong the system lifetime. We propose a new
model for energy utilization in wireless sensor networks by considering
the tradeoff between increasing transmission radius and retransmission
to maintain a high level of successful packet reception rate and let the
system have shorter lifetime with usual transmission radius. Our new
proposed model can be applied to Maximum Residual Energy Path (MREP)
algorithm and further improve the energy utilization of the whole
network. The simulation results confirm that with the new developed
model, increasing transmission radius leads to the neighborhood
extension, thus the overall system lifetime is greatly prolonged.
Compared with the original model, the new model shows its great
advantages by more uniform energy usage distribution, thus 22% increase
in system lifetime.