Cognitive Approaches to Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks

Energy efficiency and network lifetime are key factors in characterizing wireless sensor networks due to the limited energy of nodes. In this paper we present two approaches to routing in wireless sensor networks that utilize the ideas of node cooperation and information exchange to achieve cognition across multiple network layers. In the first proposal, nodes exchange information about their statistical channel parameters to achieve awareness of the coverage area and use this information in path choice and transmit power adaptation. In the second proposal, nodes share information about energy states and utilize this information in achieving load balancing across nodes in the network. Nodes also cooperate with each other to reduce unnecessary transmissions. We evaluate our proposals through computer simulations and the results show that the energy efficiency of our proposals significantly outperform existing techniques, thus achieving the greater goal of extending network lifetime.