Arbutus: Network-Layer Load Balancing for Wireless Sensor Networks

The hot spot problem is a typical byproduct of the many-to-one traffic pattern that characterizes most wireless sensor networks: the nodes with the best channel to the sink are overloaded with traffic from the rest of the network and experience a faster energy depletion rate than their peers. Routing protocols for sensor networks typically use reliability metric to avoid lossy links and thus directly exacerbate the problem. Significant advantages can be obtained by embedding a load balancing scheme at the network layer, as this paper shows with the design and implementation of Arbutus, a novel routing protocol for wireless sensor networks with a built-in load balancing scheme.