LBR: Load Balancing Routing Algorithm for Wireless Sensor Networks

Homogeneous wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are organized using identical sensor nodes, but the nature of WSNs operations results in an imbalanced workload on gateway sensor nodes which may lead to a hot-spot or routing hole problem. The routing hole problem can be considered as a natural result of the tree-based routing schemes that are widely used in WSNs, where all nodes construct a multi-hop routing tree to a centralized root, e.g., a gateway or base station. For example, sensor nodes on the routing path and closer to the base station deplete their own energy faster than other nodes, or sensor nodes with the best link state to the base station are overloaded with traffic from the rest of the network and experience a faster energy depletion rate than their peers. Routing protocols for WSNs are reliability-oriented and their use of reliability metric to avoid unreliable links makes the routing scheme worse. However, none of these reliability oriented routing protocols explicitly uses load balancing in their routing schemes. Since improving network lifetime is a fundamental challenge of WSNs, we present, in this chapter, a novel, energy-wise, load balancing routing (LBR) algorithm that addresses load balancing in an energy efficient manner by maintaining a reliable set of parent nodes. This allows sensor nodes to quickly find a new parent upon parent loss due to the existing of node failure or energy hole. The proposed routing algorithm is tested using simulations and the results demonstrate that it outperforms the MultiHopLQI reliability based routing algorithm.