  In the era of Big Data and Mobile Internet, how to ensure the terminal
devices (e.g., sensor nodes) work steadily for a long time is one of the key
issues to improve the efficiency of the whole network. However, a lot of facts
have shown that the unattended equipments are prone to failure due to energy
exhaustion, physical damage and other reasons. This may result in the emergence
of energy-hole, seriously affecting network performance and shortening its
lifetime. To reduce data redundancy and avoid the generation of sensing blind
areas, a type of Virtual Force based Energy-hole Mitigation strategy (VFEM) is
proposed in this paper. Firstly, the virtual force (gravitation and repulsion)
between nodes is introduced that makes nodes distribute as uniformly as
possible. Secondly, in order to alleviate the "energy-hole problem", the
network is divided into several annuluses with the same width. Then, another
type of virtual force, named "virtual gravity generated by annulus", is
proposed to further optimize the positions of nodes in each annulus. Finally,
with the help of the "data forwarding area", the optimal paths for data
uploading can be selected out, which effectively balances energy consumption of
nodes. Experiment results show that, VFEM has a relatively good performance on
postponing the generation time of energy-holes as well as prolonging the
network lifetime compared with other typical energy-hole mitigation methods.
