Load balancing effect of stochastic routing in wireless sensor networks

In this paper, we investigate the load balancing effect of stochastic routing in wireless sensor networks. Our motivation is based on the common claim that the randomness in routing achieves energy-efficient load balancing. We introduce an evaluation framework based on discrete time absorbing Markov chains for destination-based stochastic routing. Based on this stochastic routing framework, we investigate the load balancing effect on undirected and directed networks with randomly positioned nodes. Simulation results demonstrate that stochastic routing does not necessarily achieve energy-efficient load balancing in undirected networks. Furthermore, we analyze the performance of our distributed and decentralized stochastic routing algorithm, namely expander routing method. Simulation results shows that our expander routing method performs significantly better in terms of packet transmission delay while achieving energy-efficient load balancing in directed networks.