TOLB: A Traffic-Oblivious Load-Balancing Protocol for Next-Generation Sensornets

The multiple expected sources of traffic skewness in NextGeneration SensorNets (NGSN) will trigger the need for load-balanced point-to-point routing protocols. Driven by this fact, we present in this paper a load-balancing primitive, namely Traffic-Oblivious Load-Balancing (TOLB), to be used on top of any point-to-point routing protocol. TOLB obliviously load balances traffic by pushing the decision-making responsibility to the source of any packet without depending on the energy status of the network sensors or on previously taken decisions for similar packets. We present theoretical bounds on TOLB’s performance for special network types such as mesh networks. Additionally, we ran simulations to evaluate TOLB’s performance on general networks. Our experimental results show the high benefit (in terms of network lifetime and throughput) of applying TOLB on top of routing schemes to deal with various traffic skewness levels in different sensor deployment scenarios.