COBRA A Multi-path Adaptive Local Load Sensing Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

We propose a family of location-based load balancing muting algorithms for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) called COBRA. In this approach, we combine local load balancing with shortest path routing to strike a balance between hop-count efficiency and load distribution. COBRA´s advantages over traditional routing protocols are: (i) a significant reduction of hot-spot occurrences (i. e., nodes or areas of high congestion level), thus enabling longer uninterrupted operation of WSNs, (ii) a light-weight and scalable implementation that requires only local congestion updates, ideal for implementation on computationally challenged platforms, and (iii) combination of routing and congestion avoidance tasks in the protocol stack-a feature that leads to smoother TCP operation over wireless channels with fewer false positives on existing congestion and subsequent sending rate reduction by TCP. We show through simulation that COBRA´s local load sensing in combination with a shortest path routing component is a promising paradigm that improves global performance in terms of throughput and scalability, while matching other protocols in the traditional energy efficiency objective.