Link quality and local load balancing routing mechanisms in wireless sensor networks

The choice of a routing protocol in a wireless sensor network (WSN) depends on the nature of the application and on its primary mission. Lot of works addressed the problem of routing mechanisms with more or less effectiveness, some of which pointed out the use of the link quality indicator (LQI) as a route selection criterion (metric). In a previous work, following an experimental study, we have shown [1], under some conditions, the inefficiency of the LQI based routing. In this paper, we propose a simple way, to improve reliability and efficiency of the LQI based routing in WSN. We also evaluate other route selection criteria including the "remaining energy level" and the "sensor proximity with respect to the Base Station (BS)". The proposed local load balancing routing protocol is aimed to help source nodes to exploit potential capabilities of their respective neighbors without having any knowledge of their properties such as the position or the energy level. Simulation results show that our adaptation of the LQI metric is among the best route selection criteria regardless of the performance criterion under consideration, and that the load balancing significantly improves the routing efficiency by lengthening the network lifetime while minimizing packet losses.