Load balanced and efficient data collection protocol for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

As the state-of-the-art data collection protocol for wireless sensor networks (WSNs), collection tree protocol (CTP) has been applied to many practical applications. But, it can lead to load imbalance and data congestion as to each node chooses the most optimal path in CTP. To address the problem of load imbalance, this paper presents and evaluates V-CTP, a novel data collection protocol for wireless sensor network based on the CTP. V-CTP considers the number of child nodes, and use a virtual metric (v-eetx) to choose a path. We implement V-CTP and evaluate its performance on an indoor test-bed with 30 to 100 Telosb nodes. The experiment results show that V-CTP protocol can effectively solve the problem of load imbalance and maintain high data delivery rate as well as CTP. In addition, V-CTP achieved desirable energy-efficiency, prolonged the life of networks and improved the performance of networks.