Optimized congestion aware energy efficient traffic load balancing scheme for routing in wireless sensor networks

Load imbalance among hot spot nodes causes network congestion and earliest energy depletion of nodes in wireless sensor networks. This increases the probability of disconnecting or partitioning the network and premature death of entire network. The inefficiency in the WSN is more attributed to load imbalance or unbiased traffic. In this paper, an optimized congestion aware (OCAEE-LB) energy efficient traffic load balancing scheme for routing in WSN is proposed. The scheme utilizes the neglected information during route discovery process and considers a composite routing metric to determine congested status of a node and to enforce the traffic load balancing. The proposed scheme is simulated using ns-2 and the results demonstrate that the proposed mechanism performs better than the existing AODV-LB algorithm of various performance metrics such as, packet delivery ratio, throughput, routing overhead, end-to-end delay, load distribution and energy consumption.