An Approach for Constructing Load-Balancing Networks for Data Gathering Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks are characterized by centralized data gathering, multi-hop communication and many-to-one traffic pattern. These three characteristics may give rise to funneling effects that can lead to severe packet collision, network congestion, packet loss and even congestion collapse. This can also result in hotspots of energy consumption that may cause premature death of sensor nodes and even premature death of entire network. Load-Balancing techniques can effectively avoid the occurrence of funneling effects. Based on the static data gathering wireless sensor networks and motivated by the idea of supply and demand network, a distributed algorithm is proposed in this paper to organize the sensor node into a balanced deal network that can balance the load of nodes. The network structure constructed by this approach is not a load-balancing tree, but a load-balancing network. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of this approach.