Load Balancing and Fault Tolerance-Based Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks

Energy-efficient data collection from the environment is a critical operation in many applications areas of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Unprecedented techniques which help in ameliorating the energy efficiency are highly required to elongate the lifetime of the network. In WSNs, sensed data needs to be forwarded to the sink node in an energy-efficient manner. Multi-hop communication helps a lot in reducing the energy consumption if the parent node through which data needs to be transmitted is selected in an efficient manner. Some nodes get overloaded while others are having very less load when parent nodes are selected in a random manner. In this paper, we have proposed a linear optimization-based formulation to balance the load of the nodes by selecting the parent node in an efficient manner. Moreover, when after some interval of sensing, some parent nodes start to get dying, the child nodes change their parent node to avoid the packet loss. So, a fault tolerance strategy is also proposed. Simulation results verify that proposed work is outperforming in terms of packet delivery ratio, network lifetime, and count of dead nodes.