Load Balance and Energy Efficient Data Gathering in Wireless Sensor Networks

Many data gathering protocols for wireless sensor networks use clustering technology for prolonging the network lifetime. Cluster-based protocols reduce the total energy consumption via data aggregation, and balance energy consumption via clusterhead rotation. However, most existing protocols focus on load balance within each cluster. The energy consumption of the entire network is still unbalanced, and this uneven energy dissipation can significantly reduce the network lifetime. We propose an even energy dissipation protocol (EEDP) for efficient cluster-based data gathering in wireless sensor networks. In EEDP, the sensor data are forwarded to the base station via multiple chains of clusterheads. Each chain uses a rotation scheme to balance energy consumption among clusterheads and avoid the formation of a hot spot. We developed efficient algorithms to organize clusterheads into multiple chains, such that the traffic load is evenly distributed among different chains. Analysis and simulation results show that EEDP achieves better load balance than several existing protocols and significantly increases network lifetime.