Optimal Cluster-Cluster Design for Sensor Network with Guaranteed Capacity and Fault Tolerance

Sensor networks have recently gained a lot of attention from the research community. To ensure scalability sensor networks are often partitioned into clusters, each managed by a cluster head. Since sensors self organize in the form of clusters within a hierarchal wireless sensor network, it is necessary for a sensor node to perform target tracking cooperating with a set of sensors that belong to another cluster. The increased flexibility allows for efficient and optimized use of sensor nodes. While most of the previous research focused on the optimal communication of sensors in one cluster, very little attention has been paid to the efficiency of cooperation among the clusters. This paper proposes a heuristic algorithm of designing optimal structure across clusters to allow the inter-cluster flow of communication and resource sharing under reliability constraints. Such a guarantee simultaneously provides fault tolerance against node failures and high capacity through multi-path routing.