LBRR: Load Balanced Ring Routing Protocol for Heterogeneous Sensor Networks with Sink Mobility

In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), sink mobility requires frequent advertisement of current location of sink across the network which may introduce an overhead in terms of traffic load, collision, and energy consumption. Hence, an energy efficient routing protocol is required to minimize these overheads for reliable data delivery in the network. This paper proposes a load balanced ring routing (LBRR) protocol for the large scale heterogeneous sensor networks with sink mobility support. The design objective of proposed protocol is to balance the traffic load towards the mobile sink in a large densely deployed network. The simulation results show that the proposed protocol is an energy efficient routing protocol in case of heavy traffic load. The packet drop ratio is significantly reduced as compared to benchmark ring routing protocol by 84.36%, 82.75%, 83.5% and 82.9% when sink mobility is 1, 5, 10 and 15 km#x002F;h respectively.