Improved network lifetime and avoidance of uneven energy consumption using load factor

In wireless sensor networks, communication load over a network is not uniform and hence the nodes closer to higher load area (near to sink node) exhaust their energy quickly than nodes situated other areas, i.e. hot spot or energy hole problem. This may lead to network partition into many unreachable segments and therefore affect the performance of the network. This problem is very critical for the random deployed networks. Therefore, we propose a load balancing method based upon the modifications in the sensing and communication ranges that overcomes the non-uniform load problem (energy hole) and also ensure full coverage and connectivity with least possible nodes. This approach controls the energy disparity by dividing the network into many segments (clusters) and then providing a suitable set of communication and sensing ranges for each segment based on its load. After fixing these parameters, the nodes can get the similar energy consumption and consequently network lifetime is enhanced. The proposed method is examined analytically and verified through Matlab tool based simulation experiments. The results exhibit improvement over the existing methods.