Load distribution scheme for power saving efficiency in wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks have drawn enormous interest as the ubiquitous network society has evolved. One draw-back associated with wireless sensor networks is the concentration of network traffic on nodes and bottleneck nodes near sink nodes. Studies have explored multi-sink wireless sensor networks as a way of balancing loads across nodes near sinks, but traffic load concentration nodes are not only found around sinks. Here we propose a scheme for reducing the energy consumption of data gathering wireless sensor networks with unevenly distributed nodes, and thereby prolong the service life of networks. The proposed scheme selects multi-sink destinations based on the residual power reduction rate of nearby nodes, and curtails routing via the load-concentrated nodes after detecting these nodes based on their packet reception state. Energy consumption on the high traffic load nodes is reduced by this load balancing among relay nodes, which balances loads on load-concentrated nodes and nodes near sinks. Comparing our proposed scheme with a conventional approach by computer simulation, we prove that our method uses less energy to run topologies where load-concentrated nodes are present, and thus prolongs the service life of the network.