Dynamic Load Balancing with Overlay-Based Reconfiguration for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks are characterized by multihop wireless links and resource constrained nodes. In terms of data collection and forwarding scheduling, this paper investigates the load balancing in sensor nodes and wireless link based on the performance of wireless sensor networks. Leveraging the property of dissimilarity distribution, a method to quantitatively evaluate the benefits of load balancing is presented, in order to access the profitability. Then a novel Dynamic Load Balancing of Overlay-based WSN (DLBO) algorithm has been put forward. In particular, the tradeoff between transferring ratio and the load imbalance among nodes is discussed. The load balancing method in this paper outperforms others based on balancing factor, different nodes number and data scales of applications. The proposed model and analytical results can be effectively applied for reliability analysis for other wireless applications (e.g., persistent data delivery is involved).