Ring Topology for Balanced Workload in D2D-based Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been used as a promising technology that enables a variety of smart city applications such as Internet of Things (IoT), healthcare, transportation, education, manufacturing, and energy management. However, the ubiquitous deployment of sensor devices requires sophisticated communication techniques to ensure seamless connectivity especially in geographic areas where sensor devices are not supported by stable network connectivity such as rural areas. In this paper, ring topology is proposed for device-to-device (D2D) communication in ubiquitous sensor environments. The proposed scheme aims to achieve workload balancing while ensuring successful message dissemination among the sensor nodes. To this end, the Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP) is used to achieve load balancing such that each of the communicating nodes participates only once by receiving and forwarding the message to the next node in a ring fashion until returning to the originating node. The TSP approach generally aims to minimize the total trip distance of the multi-hop path in the D2D network and ensures that all nodes will receive the message. This approach is compared with the greedy approach whereby each sensor node determines the next hop based on the minimum distance only. Results show that the proposed scheme ensures load balancing and guarantees that all sensor nodes will receive the message.