Performance Analysis of an Enhanced Load Balancing Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

Research interest in sensor networks routing largely considers minimization of energy consumption as a major performance criterion to provide maximum sensors network lifetime. When considering energy conservation, routing protocols should also be designed to achieve fault tolerance in communications. Moreover, due to dynamic topology and random deployment, incorporating reliability into protocols for WSNs is very important. Hence, we propose an improved scalable clustering-based load balancing scheme (SCLB) in this paper. In SCLB scheme, scalability is achieved by dividing the network into overlapping multihop clusters each with its own cluster head node. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme achieves longer network lifetime with desirable reliability at the initial state compare with the existing multihop load balancing approach.