TOLB: A Traffic-Oblivious Load-Balancing Protocol for
Next-Generation Sensornets
Mohamed Aly and Anandha Gopalan
Abstract:
The multiple expected sources of traffic skewness in Next-Generation
SensorNets (NGSN) will trigger the need for load-balanced point-to-point
routing protocols. Driven by this fact, we present in this paper a
load-balancing primitive, namely Traffic-Oblivious Load-Balancing (TOLB),
to be used on top of any point-to-point routing protocol. TOLB obliviously
load balances traffic by pushing the decision-making responsibility to the
source of any packet without depending on the energy status of the network
sensors or on previously taken decisions for similar packets. We present
theoretical bounds on TOLB's performance for special network types such
as mesh networks. Additionally, we ran simulations to evaluate TOLB's
performance on general networks. Our experimental results show the high
benefit (in terms of network lifetime and throughput) of applying TOLB on
top of routing schemes to deal with various traffic skewness levels in
different sensor deployment scenarios.