An Approach to Load Balancing and Network Longevity using Dynamic Adaptive Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks

Energy efficiency is the major concern in the design of wireless sensor network (WSN). It is imperative to develop protocols to distribute energy dissipation across nodes and reduces hotspots in the networks. In this paper we introduce load balancing dynamic adaptive routing (LBDAR), a reactive protocol to find efficient data routing structure for optimal distribution of load. Rather than finding an optimal path and use it for all communication, the proposed algorithm dynamically finds routers and constitutes energy sufficient routing path from source to sink for each round of communication, by considering two node specific parameters, they are frequency count and residual battery power. Frequency count provides good chance for all the routers to actively participate in forwarding data messages and thus help to distribute the routing load. Router is selected such that it retains some battery power, called Adaptable threshold, which varies with size of sensed data. This prevents the early death of heavily involved nodes due to battery drain off, and hence enhances the network lifetime.