Abstract
Abstract Wireless sensor networks have been assumed to consist of a single sink and multiple sensor nodes which do not have mobility. In these networks, sensor nodes near the sink dissipate their energy so fast due to their many-to-one traffic pattern, and finally they die early. This uneven energy depletion phenomenon known as the hot spot problem becomes more serious as the number of sensor nodes (i.e., their scale) increases. Recently, multi-sink wireless sensor networks have been envisioned to solve the hot spot problem. Gradient routing protocols are known to be appropriate for the networks in that network traffic is evenly distributed to multiple sinks to prolong network lifetime and they are scalable. Each node maintains its gradient representing the direction toward a neighbor node to reach one of the sinks. In particular, existing protocols allow a sensor node to construct its gradient using the cumulative traffic load of a path for load balancing. However, they have a critical drawback that a sensor node cannot efficiently avoid using the path with the most overloaded node. Hence, this paper introduces a new Gradient routing protocol for LOad-BALancing (GLOBAL) with a new gradient model to maximize network lifetime. The proposed gradient model considers both of the cumulative path load and the traffic load of the most overloaded node over the path in calculating each node's gradient value. Therefore, packets are forwarded over the least-loaded path, which avoids the most overloaded node. In addition, it is known that assigning a unique address to each sensor node causes much communication overhead. Since the overhead increases as the network scales, routing protocols using an address to indicate the receiver in forwarding a packet are not scalable. Thus, GLOBAL also includes an addressing-free data forwarding strategy. Through ns-2 simulation, we verify that GLOBAL achieves better performance than the shortest path routing and load-aware gradient routing ones.
Highlights
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are composed of a large number of sensor nodes and a single sink
Instead of using an address for forwarding packets, Gradient routing protocol for LOad-BALancing (GLOBAL) uses the gradient value as the next-hop node identifier
Through the proposed heuristic method, each sensor node is enabled to more favor paths excluding the most overloaded node as its shortest hop distance to a sink decreases. This makes the traffic load of sensor nodes around sinks effectively balanced while allowing sensor nodes far away from sinks to favor the least-loaded path
Summary
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are composed of a large number of sensor nodes and a single sink. Considering the remaining energy or the queue length of the forwarder’s 1-hop neighbor nodes, the neighbor nodes with heavy traffic load or low residual energy are prevented from being selected as a forwarder, based on their customized forwarding rules In these protocols, sensor nodes cannot spread the traffic evenly since there is no way for them to get the information about heavily loaded region (i.e., hot spot regions near the sinks) several hops away from them [12]. Based on the above observation, this paper introduces a new gradient-based routing protocol for LOad-BALancing (GLOBAL) in large-scale WSNs with multiple sinks.
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