Data Drainage: A Novel Load Balancing Strategy for Wireless Sensor Networks

Load balance is a vital goal for battery-powered wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In this letter, we propose a novel load balancing strategy for data transmission of WSNs, namely, super links-based data drainage, which makes full use of the advantages of super nodes with more powerful hardware and greater communication capacity to realize data traffic redistribution. Being different from conventional passive late-remedy approaches, this is a positive and early-intervention strategy. Specifically, an evaluation function is designed to select appropriate start points and end points of super links, and the core idea is to transfer data from locations relatively far from the sink with a jump of data traffic to those near the sink with little data traffic. Extensive simulations are conducted to validate the effectiveness and advantages of the new strategy.