Load and Energy Balanced Geographic Routing for Sensor Networks

In this paper, we propose a new aggregate routing model and a distributed aggregate routing algorithm (DARA) that implements the model for achieving load and energy balanced efficient data forwarding. DARA is designed for multi-sink multipath location aware network architecture. It's a fully distributed algorithm, each node takes routing decision based on the aggregated weight of the following three parameters: normalized geographic progress towards the destination sink, normalized delay at the candidate forwarding node and normalized residual energy. DARA selects the forwarding node that has the highest aggregated weight. We develop probabilistic models for sojourn time of a packet at intermediary nodes. The simulation results demonstrate that DARA effectively improves the energy efficiency and lifetime of the network.