A Gradient-Based Dynamic Load Balance Data Forwarding Method for Multi-sink Wireless Sensor Networks

A wireless sensor network (WSN) is composed of a large number of nodes deployed in a wide area. In the sensor network, there are some special nodes referred as sinks which play the role of data collector. Sinks are connected to internet so that they can forward data to the data collecting server. Thus each sensor can forward the information they sensed to any one of these sinks. In this paper, we propose a novel data forwarding method which dynamically changes the nodes used for transmitting data from source nodes to sinks. For the data are forwarded through the nodes with more residual energy, the loading of transmitting data is distributed to different nodes and the time that the first node runs out of its energy is postponed. In our simulations, our method can prolong even more than 100% the time that the first node depletes its energy.