A cross-layered communication protocol for load balancing in large scale multi-sink wireless sensor networks

Abstract

One of the fundamental operations in sensor networks is convergecast which refers to the communication pattern in which data is collected from a set of sensor nodes and forwarded to a common end-point gateway, namely sink node, in the network. In case of multiple sinks within the network, the total load of the network has to be balanced among these sinks to minimize the problem of packet loss in the convergecast process in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) due to congestion and collisions near the sinks. In this paper, we present a novel cross-layered communication protocol for efficient data dissemination in multi-sink WSNs which is under consideration of SENSEI project. It basically combines network wide load balancing, clustering techniques and local routing optimizations with SENSEI architecture which make it efficient on both global and local level. The performance evaluation of the proposed technique shows how our routing protocol can balance the network load without additional control packets for routing tree maintenance.