A multi-hop and load balanced routing protocol oriented to the neighbors of the sink for wireless sensor networks

In wireless sensor networks with multi-hop routing protocols, the direct neighbors of the sink play a dominant role on the network lifetime. The funneling effect and the imbalance load phenomenon existing in the neighbors of the sink may lead to unnecessary energy consumption and shorten the network lifetime. To overcome the imbalance phenomenon, a load-balanced routing protocol based on the data path was proposed. The data path starts with a sensor node and ends with a direct neighbor of the sink. During the process of data gathering, multiple data paths will be constructed to balance the loads of all the neighbors of the sink. Experiments showed our protocol can well deal with the imbalance phenomenon and effectively lengthen the network lifetime.