Supervisory routing control for dynamic load balancing in low data rate wireless sensor networks

Routing protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are designed to select parent nodes so that data packets can reach their destination in a timely and efficient manner. Typically neighboring nodes with strongest connectivity are more selected as parents. This Greedy Routing approach can lead to unbalanced routing loads in the network. Consequently, the network experiences the early death of overloaded nodes causing permanent network partition. Herein, we propose a framework for load balancing of routing in WSN. In-network path tagging is used to monitor network traffic load of nodes. Based on this, nodes are identified as being relatively overloaded, balanced or underloaded. A mitigation algorithm finds suitable new parents for switching from overloaded nodes. The routing engine of the child of the overloaded node is then instructed to switch parent. A key future of the proposed framework is that it is primarily implemented at the Sink and so requires few changes to existing routing protocols. The framework was implemented in TinyOS on TelosB motes and its performance was assessed in a testbed network and in TOSSIM simulation. The algorithm increased the lifetime of the network by 41 % as recorded in the testbed experiment. The Packet Delivery Ratio was also improved from 85.97 to 99.47 %. Finally a comparative study was performed using the proposed framework with various existing routing protocols.