Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) can benefit from ad hoc networking technology characterized by multihop wireless connectivity and infrastructure less framework. These features make them suitable for next-generation networks to support several applications such M2M applications for smart cities and public safety scenarios. Pivotal design requirements for these scenarios are energy efficiency, since many of these devices will be battery powered placing a fundamental limit on network, and specifically node lifetime. Moreover, the way in which traffic is managed also influences network lifetime, since there is a high probability for some nodes to become overloaded by packet forwarding operations in order to support neighbour data exchange. These issues imply the need for energy efficient and load balanced routing approaches that can manage the network load and not only provide reduced energy consumption on the network but also prolong the network lifetime providing robust and continuous. This work proposes a new energy efficient and traffic balancing routing approach that can provide a weighted and flexible trade-off between energy consumption and load dispersion. Simulation results show that the proposed protocol achieves high energy efficiency, decreases the percentage of failed nodes due to lack of battery power, and extends the lifespan of the network.
Nodes in ad hoc networks can be unfairly burdened to support many packet-relaying functions, resulting in excessive loads on these hot spots. This load on nodes appears in two major aspects: traffic and power consumption. Unbalanced traffic may lead to more delay, packet dropping, and decreasing packet delivery ratio (PDR). Unbalanced energy consumption leads to node failure, network partitioning and decreases network lifetime and route reliability. Existing approaches try to improve the performance of routing protocols with respect to traffic balancing or energy consumption balancing, but most lead to drawbacks such as more delay, blocking, or dependence on global information from all nodes. In this paper we improve the well known Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) protocol to the so called Load Balanced DSR (LBDSR) protocol. We modify the RREQ (Route Request) and RREP (Route Reply) messages in DSR in order to maintain the remaining energy of intermediate nodes which forward RREQ and RREP. Route structure, available in the nodes cache, is modified so that the remaining energy of nodes can be calculated. LBDSR shows better traffic balancing and energy consumption balancing, end-to-end delay and route reliability metrics than DSR. Furthermore, LBDSR can also be customized to achieve better performance with respect to each of these metrics instead of being a trade-off between them.
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