Load Balancing in Wireless Sensor Networks using Statistic-Based Routing 

Alexander Klein, EADS


Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) make high demands on routing protocols due 
to limited memory and computation power of the sensor nodes. Therefore, 
the routing protocols have to generate and maintain reliable routes that 
are optimized with respect to QoS or energy efficiency without the use of 
complex algorithms and a huge amount of memory. 

Energy efficient topologies can be calculated by using propagated link 
state information. However, topology calculation requires much computation 
power depending on the size and the density of the network. Frequent 
topology changes as a consequence of sleep times, interference, or energy 
depletion make it necessary to keep redundant routing information within 
the network to compensate link failures.

In this work, we focus on the capability of the Statistic-Based routing 
protocol to route and balance traffic along optimized paths without the 
need for topology calculation. Furthermore, we introduce different routing 
metrics which can be used to disseminate traffic and energy consumption 
equally in the network.