Energy-efficient load balancing scheme for two-tier communication in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor network (WSN) has gained an enormous attention of researchers with its dynamic applications. Energy is considered as a scarce and the most vital resource in WSNs. In clustering-based approach, there is huge energy consumption while communicating data from cluster to base station (BS) and from sensor nodes to cluster head within a cluster. The repetitive use of same nodes and paths can result in network hole problem and service unavailability. There are number of research areas which have addressed the issues of energy efficiency and service availability. Load balancing is considered as one of the key techniques which are used to balance the trade-off between energy efficiency and service availability. In this research work, a novel real-time energy efficient load balancing technique for two-tier communication is proposed in which, initially in Tier 1, the energy consumption is reduced for communication between cluster to BS by applying space-time block coding over M-ary quadrature amplitude modulation and binary phase-shift keying modulations. In Tier 2, within a cluster, the energy consumption of communication among sensor nodes and CHs is reduced by utilizing the concepts of feedback control system, in which there is no need of the knowledge of static traffic demands. The performance of the proposed technique has been compared with the existing techniques in terms of energy utilization variation with varying order of transmit diversity and varying cluster BS distances, optimization of constellation sizes, energy utilization variation with cluster–BS distances for varying maximum link utilization and data rates along with varying traffic distribution and topology.