Implementing continuous flow over dense Wireless Sensor Networks

One of the challenges in routing for dense Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) is balancing the traffic over different paths. Load-balancing methods inspired by physical phenomena such as electrostatics and optics have been studied in recent years, and the proposed methods are promising in energy-critical routing applications. Such methods model information flow in continuous domain in order to benefit from well-established continuous space optimization methods; however, the existing literature on physics inspired approaches do not address the link between continuous and discrete space models. In this paper, we present a discretization method for linking continuous flow to discrete paths in a dense-WSN. We study a p-norm flow optimization method in continuous domain and show that a fixed-path routing is not sufficient to completely balance traffic load over the network. Our results show that a significant improvement in transport capacity can be achieved by using a dynamic path selection scheme and balancing the traffic over the selected paths.