An efficient data collection and load balance algorithm in wireless sensor networks

The nature of multi-hop data transmission in wireless sensor network will cause serious load unbalance which will produce great restrains in related applications considering the limited energy resource. Relative load balance algorithms are usually performed inside the clusters without considering about the energy consumption of the whole network. A cluster-based balanced energy consumption algorithm (BECA) is proposed by introducing in multiple inter-cluster links to distribute the load, so as to achieve global load balance. Moreover, an efficient data collecting mechanism is proposed based on BECA to improve the traffic balance further. Simulating results based on NS2 show that BECA can obtain better balance properties and prolong the network lifetime effectively.