Load balancing mechanism for data-centric routing in wireless sensor networks

Routing protocols in wireless sensor networks are became one of the most challenges for these last years. Proposing an efficient and a suitable routing protocol was the aim of many works to route the data with a less consumption of energy and to prolong the network lifetime. This paper investigates a proposition of a new variant of the reference routing protocol Directed Diffusion. This variant, that we call DDLB (Directed Diffusion with Load Balancing mechanism), tries to improve the DD algorithm by introducing a load balancing mechanism in order to balance the energy of the sensors and improve the network lifetime. Simulation results, under the Network Simulator 2 (NS2), show that DDLB can improve the performance more than the standard DD protocol in terms of network lifetime and response time. Further, results show that DDLB can efficiently balance the energy load of the sensors. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.