Traffic-aware Routing for Wireless Sensor Networks in Built Environment

Traffic aggregation in large-scale and multi-hopping wireless sensor networks (WSN) can generate a high load on some intermediate nodes that are close to the access point (sink) due to packet relaying, especially in complex in-door environment. This can result in over-burdened sensor nodes exhausting their batteries resulting in more frequent need replacement. This paper studies the characteristics of traffic aggregation in large-scale WSNs, using per-node power consumption, and presents a new routing technique dynamically choosing a traffic-aware distance-vector from multiple topologically reachable sets in consideration of minimal hop-count and link-quality, to balance the load within the network and thus reduce the frequency of network maintenance. Simulations are conducted in an indoor environment with partitioning, where densely distributed sensors are operating on existing physical and MAC technologies, e.g., for a fire safety monitoring application.