Dynamic Routing Selection for Wireless Sensor Networks

With the decrease in the cost and in the size of computing devices, wireless sensor networks (WSNET) have the potential of being composed by an extremely large number of nodes offering multiple services. Such networks have the capability of executing multiple tasks concurrently by allocating simply a fraction of their resources. Alternatively, many smaller wireless networks may collaborate to execute a larger, unforeseen application. In both cases a routing scheme other than the prevailing one may improve the efficiency of the task or the application being executed, reducing the energy consumption in the network. We posit that to fully tap into the potential of such networks a new routing infrastructure is needed, one that allows switching between different routing schemes dynamically as required by the applications being deployed, the conditions of the network as a whole and the existing locality information. We show in this paper how dynamic routing scheme selection can be achieved when sensor networks are overlaid with a virtual attribute based cluster hierarchy. We present analytical results for our scheme and show the expected improvement that can be achieved.