Load-balanced Route Discovery for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks have received academia research attention at present. A typically task in a wireless sensor network is that every sensor node senses its local environment and, upon request, sends the data of interest back to the sink node. The energy-constrain sensors in wireless sensor networks operate on limited batteries, so it is a very important issue to use energy efficiently and reduce power consumption. Most recent  routing protocols tend to find the minimum energy cost path to lower energy usage for all routing paths, thus, they may lead to some of the nodes deplete their energy quickly. To maximize the network survivability by using equal energy among as many nodes as possible, this paper presents a novel load balancing multipath routing algorithm. In the paper, the sensor networks are constructed into a layered network. Based on the layered network, we propose a load balanced algorithm for constructing multiple routing paths to transmit data.  The protocol spreads the routing load between the source and destination nodes over a large number of sensor nodes to minimize disparity in the energy levels of the sensor nodes. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can prolong the network life effectively and enhance the data transmission efficiency.