Localized routing protocols based on minimum balanced tree in wireless sensor networks

Reducing energy consumption and prolonging lifetime of network to reduce the amount of packet loss are important issues in wireless sensor networks. Many researches derive the minimum hop path for each sensor to transmit its corresponding data to the sink. The sensors in the path forward the data. However, some common sensors in many forwarding paths will consume much more energy, and then they will die soon. Besides, the establishment and maintenance of the above routing need the whole information of the network, and this will consume more energy in gathering and synchronizing the locations of all sensors. In this paper, each sensor using the information of neighboring sensors derives the minimum hop path to the sink, and with the knowledge of the loading of its up-streaming sensors, it selects the minimum loaded sensor for its first sensor to transmit to. In this way, the loading of each sensor will be balanced. The above routing derives minimum balanced tree (MBT). This data structure will be adjusted locally while some sensors change their statuses in the network such that the control overhead needed to adjust is much less than to reconstruct all over again. Some results of simulated experimentations are shown in this paper.