Fuzzy diffusion for distributed sensor networks

Distributed sensor networks (DSNs) are an emerging technology, recently finding extensive application in scientific and military surveillance. DSNs operate under severe energy constraints and are largely characterized by short-range multi-hop radio communications, which drives the need for energy-efficient routing schemes in such networks. Directed diffusion, a data-centric routing approach for application-aware DSNs has been shown to outperform traditional wireless routing schemes and achieves reasonable energy conservation through data-aggregation. However, directed diffusion ignores the energy level of sensor nodes, and we believe that incorporating the knowledge of relative energy reserves into the routing algorithm will improve energy efficiency and significantly prolong network lifetime. In this paper, we introduce fuzzy diffusion, an energy optimization on the directed diffusion scheme, and quantify its energy performance using ns-2 simulations.