Improving the Energy Balance of Field-Based Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks

For high-density networks, several studies have proposed field-based routing paradigms to uniformly distribute the traffic load throughout the network. However, as network density decreases, we observe major shortcomings of the current state-of-the-art: (i) fewer number of neighbors reduce the number of available paths and leads to path merging and (ii) the paths directed towards the border of the network merge into a single path. These path merging effects decrease significantly the energy balance, and as consequence, the lifetime of the network. In this paper, we propose a novel mechanism to enable a better load balancing for single-source and multiple-source scenarios. Our evaluations demonstrate that by using the proposed methodology, the network lifetime can be prolonged between 30% and 40%.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: GLOBECOM
• Authors: Goce Trajcevski, Oliviu Ghica, Peter Scheuermann, Marco Zuniga, Rene Schubotz, Manfred Hauswirth
• Keywords: Communications, Field-based Routing, GLOBECOM 2010, Major Shortcomings, Network Density