W*-Grid: A Robust Decentralized Cross-layer Infrastructure for Routing and Multi-Dimensional Data Management in Wireless Ad-Hoc Sensor Networks

Sensor networks are usually composed by small units able to sense and transmit to a sink elementary data which are successively processed by an external machine. However recent improvements in the memory and computational power of sensors, together with the reduction of energy consumptions, are rapidly changing the potential of such systems, moving the attention towards data-centric sensor networks. This paper presents W*-Grid, a fully decentralized and robust infrastructure for self-organizing data- centric sensor networks, where wireless communications occur through multi-hop routing among devices. The solution extends W-Grid by strongly improving the network recovery performance from link and/or device failures. In particular W*-Grid guarantees, by construction, at least two disjoint paths between each couple of nodes. This implies that the recovery in W*-Grid occurs without broadcasting transmissions and guaranteeing robustness while drastically reducing the energy consumption. An extensive number of simulations show the efficiency, robustness and traffic load of resulting networks under several scenarios of device density and of number of coordinates.