We develop energy-balancing strategies for wireless ad-hoc networks energy resource allocation and deployment. The objective is to extend the network lifetime. We find the amount of energy storage that each node requires for having a balanced energy consumption throughout the network. For a limited set of energy resources in the deployment area, we determine an efficient deployment scenario in which messages are routed across the network while using the fastest delivery path. Two ad-hoc architectures are considered: first, where the network is peerto-peer and all the nodes have the same characteristics; and second, a base-station centric network where a base-station in the center collects the data from the ad-hoc nodes. We study synchronous and asynchronous communication paradigms for both architectures. To address the problems, we first determine the deployment scheme that results in the most comprehensive radio coverage. Next, we calculate the energy distribution for each network scenario. Then, the derived distributions are extended to randomly deployed networks. We present a thorough analysis and comparison for peer-to-peer and base-station architectures, for both synchronous and asynchronous paradigms. Our experimental evaluations show that the energy-balancing distributions extend the network’s lifetime by more than 40% when compared to nonbalanced networks with no overhead on message routing delay.