Spiral Grid Routing for Load Balance in Wireless Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks, it is an important task to periodically collect data from an area of interest for time-sensitive applications. The sensed data must be gathered and transmitted to a base station for further processing to meet the end-user queries. Since the network consists of low-cost nodes with limited battery power, it is a challenging task to design an efficient routing scheme that can collect massive data and offer good performance in energy efficiency, and long network lifetimes. Grid structure was proposed for energy efficient data routing. Instead of propagating query messages from sink to all sensors to set up data forwarding information, the grid structure uses only sensors located at the grid points needed to acquire the forwarding information. In this paper, we propose a load balancing routing technique, called Spiral Grid Routing (SGR) protocol, to improve the performance of previous grid routing protocols. Simulation results show that SGR achieves a better solution in load balancing and therefore prolongs the network´s lifetime in wireless sensor networks.