Load Balancing and Network Life in Linear Wireless Sensor Networks.

The distributed management of residual energy among sensor devices within wireless sensor networks is a crucial technique that can be leveraged to maximize network lifetime. This paper proposes an approach towards this goal based on an ultra-low-power Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol and a geographical multi-hop routing protocol according to a given metric. The best node for the next hop is selected as a function of the minimum hop count and a link cost function. This is done in a manner which minimizes the overall energy consumption of the network, while balancing the load according to the residual energy at each node. To achieve this, the cost function accounts for residual energy, free buffer size, and link reliability to neighbouring nodes. It is designed to balance energy consumption, network life and QoS requirements in terms of end-to-end delay and reliability. Simulation results are presented, obtained through the Castalia framework based on the Omnet++ simulator. These results demonstrate the viability of the proposed scheme through observation of key performance parameters as a function of consumed energy, active time ratio of each node, and packet delivery ratio.