Characterizing the Traffic Load Distribution in Dense Sensor Networks

Traffic load is not evenly distributed over the nodes in a wireless sensor network (WSN). Understanding the traffic load distribution can guide the network-wide energy allocation, direct the design of routing algorithms, and optimize the node deployment in WSNs. In this paper, we consider a dense WSN with nodes uniformly distributed in a disk sensing area, and find the traffic load distribution over the nodes as a function of their distance from the sink. Further, the effects of network scale and routing strategy on traffic load are also investigated. The traffic loads on individual nodes are found to be in direct proportion to the radius of the network and in inverse proportion to the routing hop length, while independent of network density. The results presented in this paper are verified through extensive simulation experiments.