An efficient load balancing and performance optimization scheme for constraint oriented networks

Abstract

A constraint oriented wireless sensor network (WSN) faces a challenging task of handling different issues i.e., routing mechanism, coverage of the underlined sensing fields for as long as possible, energy efficiency, reliable transmission of packets, congestion controls etc. Load balancing or routing protocols, which are specifically designed for the resource limited sensor networks, resolve some of these issues. However, most of these mechanisms were either applications specific or overlay complex. Moreover, these techniques underestimated an important aspect of WSNs i.e., sensor nodes criticality or vulnerability factor that is defined as the importance of a node from the network connectivity perspective. In this paper, an efficient load balancing and performance optimization scheme (LBS) is presented to address these issues such as throughput, long term connectivity, end to end delay and energy efficiency in resource limited WSNs. The proposed LBS technique conflates a sensor node criticality factor, residual energy and hop-count to form an optimized load balancing strategy. Initially, the proposed LBS routes most of the load or traffic on the shortest paths by assigning a highest weight-age factor, 80%, to the hop count metric and lower weight-age to both criticality and residual energy metrics i.e., 20%. Load balancing strategy is revised if one or more nodes deplete 50% of their on-board batteries. Simulation results verify that the proposed LBS scheme outperforms the existing field proven approaches i.e., shortest path, vulnerability aware routing, energy based spreading and multiple path based load balancing schemes.