Coverage based intercluster communication for load balancing in wireless sensor networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) monitors changes in the operational environment and collaborate to actuate distributed tasks in dynamic uncertain and hostile environments. The biggest constraint of these networks is short life time. In this context, various schemes have been presented in order to improve the life time of these networks and to overcome the energy constraint. This paper presents a new cluster based routing algorithm to address the traditional problem of load balancing and energy efficiency in the WSNs. The proposed algorithm makes use of the nodes in a sensor network whose area coverage is covered by the neighboring nodes and marks these nodes as temporary cluster heads. These temporary cluster heads are later used for multihop intercluster communication. Performance studies indicate that the proposed algorithm solves effectively the problem of load balancing across the network and is more energy efficient compared to standard Leach and the enhanced version of Leach algorithms.