Abstract

Load balancing is effective in reducing network congestion and improving network throughput in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Due to the fluctuation of wireless channels, traditional schemes achieving load balancing in WSNs need to maintain global or local congestion information, which turn out to be complicated to implement. In this paper, we design a flowlet switching based load balancing scheme, called EasyLB, by extending OpenFlow protocol. Flowlet switching is efficient to achieve adaptive load balancing in WSNs. Nevertheless, one tricky problem lies in determining the flowlet timeout value, . Setting it too small would risk reordering issue, while setting it too large would reduce flowlet opportunities. By formulating the timeout setting problem with a stationary distribution of Markov chain, we give a theoretical reference for setting an appropriate timeout value in flowlet switching based load balancing scheme. Moreover, non-equal probability path selection and multiple parallel load balancing paths are considered in timeout setting problem. Experimental results show that, by setting timeout value following the preceding theoretical reference, EasyLB is adaptive to wireless channel condition change and achieves fast convergence of load balancing after link failures.

Highlights

  • In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), many sensor nodes are deployed to collect various types of data from the environment, e.g., temperature, image and video

  • How to achieve adaptive load balancing in WSNs is a crucial problem

  • In this paper, we investigate the theoretical reference on setting an appropriate timeout value in flowlet switching based load balancing scheme, and verify the theoretical results in an OpenFlow enabled network

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Summary

Introduction

In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), many sensor nodes are deployed to collect various types of data from the environment, e.g., temperature, image and video. Sensors 2018, 18, 3060 and MicroTE [17] operate load balancing at flow level These schemes do not generally cause packet reordering problem, but they cannot achieve accurate load balancing ratio. Vanini et al [21] found that this property of flowlet can achieve adaptive and resilient load balancing in the presence of topological asymmetry They have implemented an extremely simple flowlet switching based load balancing scheme, called LetFlow [21]. A pre-designed timeout in one network cannot always reach good performance in other scenarios To solve this problem, in this paper, we investigate the theoretical reference on setting an appropriate timeout value in flowlet switching based load balancing scheme, and verify the theoretical results in an OpenFlow enabled network.

EasyLB Design and Implementation
Timeout Setting in EasyLB
Markov Chain Model
Formalization of Timeout Setting Problem
Timeout Setting in Non-Equal Probability Path Selection
Timeout Setting in Multiple Parallel Load Balancing Paths
Performance Evaluation
Asymmetric Topology with Random Path Selection
Symmetric Topology with Random Path Selection
Non-Equal Probability Path Selection
Multiple Parallel Paths
React to Link Failure
Findings
Conclusions and Future Work

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