A Location-Based Deterministic Load Balancing for Cluster Routing Protocol in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) play an important role in Internet of Things (IoT). Routing protocols are essential for energy-efficient WSN with battery powered sensor nodes. Cluster-based hierarchical routing protocols are renowned for its simplicity and efficiency in WSN. However, stochastic cluster formation in conventional schemes often suffer from high energy drain. We suggest a location-based load balancing scheme with a deterministic cluster formation approach. Our proposed scheme features the location phase which is carried out once before the first round starts in the beginning. In the location phase, the sensor nodes exchange greeting messages to measure the distance between every pair of nodes. The distance information is forwarded to the base station (BS) node. The BS node calculates the exact coordinate of every sensor node and then constructs a deterministic process for cluster head selection and transmission scheduling in clusters. Our proposed scheme is evaluated through computer simulations and is shown to outperform existing schemes with or without location information, in terms of network/node lifespan.