Gathering-Load-Balanced Tree Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless communications and digital electronics have enabled the development of low-power, low-cost, multifunctional sensors. The functionality of sensor network mainly is the measurement collection. The previous proposed protocols mainly focus on broadcasting tree structure, but it may not be efficient in data gathering. In this paper, we propose novel tree architecture that is a dynamic, adjustable, load-balanced tree in sensor networks to decrease the energy utilization and to prolong the lifetime of sensors. A load-balanced tree can share the forwarding loads between non-leaf nodes. Due to the limit of tree topology, we try to adjust forming a tree that has similar amount of children between non-leaf nodes. When the energy of non-leaf node is lower than a designated threshold, the tree structure can be readjusted to prolong the lifetime of tree. In simulation, we compare our protocol with different adjustment phases and an existed protocol. From the result, our protocol can have better performance than others