A fundamental issue in the design of a wireless sensor network is to devise mechanisms to make efficient use of its energy, and thus, extend its lifetime. Due to the importance of energy conservation, it is highly desirable to define the amount of energy each protocol can spend to perform its goal. Using this idea, we can associate a finite energy budget with each network activity, and ask this activity to achieve its best performance using only its budget. This should be considered a new paradigm to design algorithms for networks that are battery powered, specially for wireless sensor networks. In this paper, we present this new paradigm, and show how it can be used to construct the energy map of a wireless sensor network. Our goal is to construct the best energy map using only a defined amount of energy. Results show that we can approach these performance limits using the proposed finite energy budget model.
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