Load Distribution of Sensors in Multi-Sink Wireless Sensor Network

Abstract

A wireless sensor network (WSN) is composed of a large number of sensors deployed in a wide area. In the sensor network, there are some special sensors referred as sinks which play the role of data collector. Sinks are connected to internet so that they can forward data to the data collecting server. Thus each sensor can forward the information they sensed to any one of these sinks. However, the loading or energy consumption of sensors in networks is heterogeneous such that some sensors might die earlier than the others. In this case, data from sensors would not be delivered properly to the sinks. Sensors located in different positions might bear different communication responsibilities, e.g. forwarding the data generated by some other sensors. In this paper, we propose analytic quantized models to simulate the operations of multi-hopped routing protocols to evaluate the load distribution of sensors in multi-sink WSN. With the knowledge, routing protocols could be developed or adjusted properly to prolong the network lifetime and enhance the network availability. Analytic results are shown in this paper.