Efficient Load Balancing and Data Aggregation Multipath Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) comprise spatially distributed wireless sensors, small battery powered devices, which are deployed among geographical areas to collect the data continuously. The routing plays an important role in a network for deciding the path for transmitting the data between source and destination based on certain Quality of Service (QoS) parameters. In order to transmit the data in an energy efficient and reliable manner, multipath routing is the most viable routing mechanism. The energy of nodes near to sink drains quickly and thereby giving rise to network hole and hotspot problem and resulting into partitioning of network. If the traffic or load can be distributed over the multiple routes, then network hole problem can be avoided and energy dissipation of a network can be balanced. To ensure reliability and load balancing, the trade-off is needed between the level of redundancy and energy efficiency. As the energy dissipation for communication is significantly higher than the energy required for computation, the energy can be conserved by performing in-network data aggregation at intermediate nodes instead of sending the whole data to the Base Station individually. Therefore, to optimize the QoS parameters such as energy, delay and network lifetime etc., there is a need of multipath routing framework for energy efficient data aggregation and load balancing for WSNs. Currently, most of the data aggregation techniques maximize the energy efficiency without paying considerable attention to the data accuracy and varying conditions of underlying network topology. The level of data aggregation and frequency of data reporting should be adaptive with the varying density of the network and traffic pattern. The energy level of a node also gets affected due to collisions happening during the transmissions. These collisions should be prevented by applying protocols that are free of contention. While splitting and sending the data over the multiple paths, reliability and security should be ensured.