A Load Balance Redirect Routing Scheme for Multi-sink Wireless Sensor Networks

A multi-sink wireless sensor network (WSN) is composed of a large number of sensors deployed in a wide area and there are some special sensors referred as sinks which play the role of data collector. Since sensors located in different positions may bear different communication responsibilities, e.g. forwarding the data generated by some other sensors, the loading or energy consumption of each sensor in network is heterogeneous. Obviously, some sensors may die earlier than the others and thus cause the bottleneck phenomenon in the network. We find that not only sensors located near around the sinks but also those in the forwarding paths from the farthest sensors to the sinks will consume more energy. A forwarder selection method is proposed to leverage the loading of sensors in the longest forwarding path. Simulation results show that the load distribution is more balanced after the proposed linear descent selection method is applied.