Load-Balanced Data Dissemination for Wireless Sensor Networks: A Nature-Inspired Approach

The traditional many-to-one transmission pattern allows all sensor nodes to propagate their packets toward a single sink in wireless sensor networks, resulting in imbalanced energy depletion in the network. In this paper, we propose a data dissemination strategy named transmission with multiple load balancing schemes (TMLBSs) which utilizes a nature-inspired approach, ant colony optimization, to construct transmission paths for nodes in different places. The distinct characteristics of TMLBS are three load balancing schemes, which help to construct transmission paths formed into a path tree. The first one is the load decentralization scheme, which creates multiple path subtrees in the early stage and scatters the whole load to such path subtrees, so as to avoid excessive load concentration. The second one is the load maintenance scheme, which adopts an appropriate pheromone update mechanism to retain previous good paths, yielding excellent next-generation solutions. The last one is the load diversion scheme, which employs the heuristic factor to transfer traffic load to paths with light traffic load to eliminate poor solutions. Finally, extensive simulations are conducted to validate the effectiveness and advantages of the new transmission strategy.