Data-centric integrated routing algorithm in wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks are uniquely characterized by extreme limited resources, dramatically low data rate, and many-to-one How pattern. Consequently, traditional routing schemes proposed for mobile ad-hoc networks often cannot be directly applied therein. In particular, routing schemes in large scale wireless sensor networks are demanded to be ultra energy efficient and balanced in order to prolong the overall network life due to the potentially immense amount of sensor data. Data-centric technologies and load balancing scheme are both needed to achieve the goal of extending the network lifetime. In this paper, we propose a novel data-centric integrated routing algorithm that uniquely combines data-centric and multi-path routing, taking advantage of both data aggregation and routing angle. Not only can this scheme achieve load balancing among multiple sensor nodes, but also can it effectively eliminate data redundancy. Theoretically and experimentally, we show that the proposed scheme can achieve significant performance gains over existing algorithms across a wide range of operational scenarios.