A Distributed Method for Bottleneck Node Detection in Wireless Sensor Network

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been considered as a promising method for reliably monitoring both civil and military environments under hazardous or dangerous conditions. Due to the special property and difference from the traditional wireless network, the lifetime of the whole network is the most important aspect. The bottleneck nodes widely exist in WSNs and lead to decrease the lifetime of the whole network. In order to find out the bottleneck nodes, the traditional centralized bottleneck detection method MINCUT has been proposed as a solution for WSNs. However they are impractical for the networks that have a huge number of nodes. This paper first proposes a distributed algorithm called DBND (Distributed Bottleneck Node detection) that can reduce the time for location information collection, lower the algorithm complexity and find out the bottleneck nodes quickly. We also give two simple suggestions of how to solve the bottleneck problem. The simulation results and analysis show that our algorithm achieves much better performance and our solutions can relax the bottleneck problem, resulting in the prolonging of the network lifetime.