Application-Level Load Balancing for Reactive Wireless Sensor Networks: An Approach Based on Constraint Optimization Problems

Abstract

As Wireless Sensor Networks - WSNs are being used more and more in applications with high demand for the processing of videos and images, the processing load of the nodes also must be considered by energy-saving strategies. Usually, these strategies focused only on communication. The overloading of nodes can result in a degraded performance regarding the network lifetime and availability of the provided services. A few algorithms, based on heuristics, have been proposed in the literature to balance the load at the application level. These algorithms drawnback are the lack of quality assurance. Thus, this work presents a novel semi-distributed solution, applying techniques to solve Constraint Optimization Problem - COP on the load balancing in a WSN. Our approach guarantee that all events are processed during the lifetime of the network and that there is a fixed number of exchanged messages per event, only reducing the lifetime of the network by an estimable time. Experimental results pointed out that the proposed approach allows the network, while alive, to sense all happened events each day, and its performance is better than the one achieved by the state-of-the-art for lower density networks.