A load balanced location service for location information management of multi-sink Wireless Sensor Networks

摘要

In many applications of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), the network has a few mobile sinks in addition to a large number of static sensor nodes that gather information from their surrounding environment. The static sensor nodes in such applications use a location service to find the location of a mobile sink. Most of the proposed location services are useful in mobile ad hoc networks and are not efficient for WSNs. Furthermore, new protocols specifically designed for WSNs are not load balanced. Some sensor nodes relay more packets and deplete their energy quickly, hence reducing the network lifetime dramatically. In this paper, we propose a location service called Load Balanced Location Service (LBLS) for WSNs containing a few mobile sinks. LBLS selects four nodes in the network outline and only uses the location of these nodes. LBLS do not deplete the energy of specific nodes comparing to other mechanisms that forward location information messages toward selected nodes. We formally prove that in LBLS every sensor node can always locate any mobile node in the network. By using exhaustive simulation, we show that LBLS is a load balanced location service. Simulation results demonstrate the superiority of LBLS regarding the load balancing factor compared to most available related location services.