Load Balancing Techniques in Multi-Sink Wireless Sensor Networks

Zexin Li; Guanhong Chen; Yadong Gong; Chengjin Zhou

doi:10.54097/shm0xt03

Authors

Zexin Li School of Computer Science and Software, Zhaoqing University, Zhaoqing 526061, China
Guanhong Chen School of Computer Science and Software, Zhaoqing University, Zhaoqing 526061, China
Yadong Gong School of Computer Science and Software, Zhaoqing University, Zhaoqing 526061, China
Chengjin Zhou School of Computer Science and Software, Zhaoqing University, Zhaoqing 526061, China

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.54097/shm0xt03

Keywords:

Wireless sensor network, load balancing, multiple sinks, sink deployment

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) rely on battery-powered sensor nodes, making load balancing essential for prolonging network lifetime and ensuring reliable data delivery. Multi-sink WSNs can mitigate the hot-spot problem of single-sink architectures by distributing data collection points, but they also introduce complex imbalance among nodes, paths, cluster heads, and sink service regions. This paper reviews load balancing in multi-sink WSNs by first defining major load types and balancing objects, including communication, energy, path, cluster-head, and sink-region loads. Then, this paper analyzes imbalance formation from network topology, sink placement, node-sink association, routing strategy, traffic dynamics, and residual energy variation. Existing methods are classified into sink deployment, node association, load-aware routing, clustering, mobile sink scheduling, and intelligent optimization approaches, with their advantages and limitations compared. Finally, key challenges are discussed, including dynamic load awareness, low-overhead state maintenance, multi-objective trade-offs, static-mobile sink coordination, and lightweight adaptive mechanisms for practical deployment.

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