SPECIAL SECTION ON RELIABILITY IN SENSOR-CLOUD SYSTEMS AND APPLICATIONS (SCSA) Received September 15, 2020, accepted September 26, 2020, date of publication September 29, 2020, date of current version October 13, 2020. Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3027688 A Reliable Communication and Load Balancing Scheme for Resource-Limited Networks XIUPING ZHENG 1 , ASMA IDREES 2 , FAZLULLAH KHAN 3,4 , (Senior Member, IEEE), SAIMA ANWAR LASHARI 5 , RAHIM KHAN 2 , MEILING LI 1 , MUHAMMAD TAHIR 6 , (Senior Member, IEEE), AND MIAN AHMAD JAN 2 , (Senior Member, IEEE) 1 School of Electronics and Information Engineering, Taiyuan University of Science and Technology, Taiyuan 030024, China 2 Department of Computer Science, Abdul Wali Khan University Mardan, Mardan 23200, Pakistan 3 Informetrics Research Group, Ton Duc Thang University, Ho Chi Minh City 758307, Vietnam 4 Faculty of Information Technology, Ton Duc Thang University, Ho Chi Minh City 758307, Vietnam 5 College of Computing and Informatics, Saudi Electronic University, Dammam 32256, Saudi Arabia 6 College of Computing and Informatics, Saudi Electronic University, Riyadh 41583, Saudi Arabia Corresponding author: Fazlullah Khan (fazlullah@tdtu.edu.vn) ABSTRACT Sensor-cloud infrastructure provides a storage platform for the massive sensed data, that is flexible and re-configurable, for various application areas which are monitored through the resource-limited networks such as wireless sensor networks (WSNs), ad hoc networks, and Internet of things (IoT). Due to their overwhelming characteristics, these networks are used in different application areas to assist human beings in their daily-life activities. However, these networks have different challenging issues such as reliability in communication and processing, storage of the massive data, efficient utilization of on-board battery, maximum lifetime achievement, minimum possible average packet loss ratio, and reliable routing mechanisms. Although various communication and load balancing mechanisms have been proposed in the literature to resolve this issue, however, these schemes are either application specific or overlay complex. In this paper, a reliable communication and load balancing scheme for the resource-limited networks is presented to resolve these issues, particularly with available resources. To achieve these goals, the proposed scheme bounds every sensing device C i to compute the transmission capabilities of its neighboring devices that is residual energy E r , hop count H c , round trip time (RTT i ), and processing cost. Initially, to guarantee reliable wireless communication, a source device prefers a neighboring device C i with minimum H c value over those having maximum H c values. Moreover, this scheme bounds every device C i to find four shortest & reliable paths and forward maximum packets on two of these paths preferably on the most reliable and optimal route. Therefore, unlike the traditional shortest path scheme, devices C i reside on these paths do not deplete their on-board battery more rapidly than others. To further improve the reliability of the proposed scheme, the assigned weight-age factors are fine-tuned if one or two of the neighboring devices C i consume 80% of their on-board battery, that is now maximum weight-age is assigned to the residual energy E r and minimum to H c value respectively. Simulation results show the exceptional performance of the proposed reliable communication and load balancing scheme against the field-proven schemes in terms of average packet delivery ratio, average throughput, end-to-end delay, and overall network lifetime. INDEX TERMS Reliable communication, reliable load balancing, resource-limited networks, classifier, WSNs. I. INTRODUCTION Generally, Sensor-Cloud infrastructure was proposed to manage various devices, i.e., sensor nodes and actuators, The associate editor coordinating the review of this manuscript and approving it for publication was Md. Arafatur Rahman . which are deployed randomly to monitor a particular activ- ity. The sensor-cloud infrastructure was formed through the integration of resource-limited networks with cloud computing mechanisms to enhance the operational capac- ities of these networks in various application areas [1]. Sensor-cloud resolves some common issues associated with VOLUME 8, 2020 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. For more information, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 179921