S-Web: An Efficient and Self-organizing Wireless Sensor Network Model

One of the major weaknesses of existing centralized algorithms in Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) routing is that sensor nodes are required to report their status (e.g. remaining energy level) to the central node (i.e. the Base Station ---BS) and receive configuration information from the BS (e.g. next hop routing). As a result, the WSNs suffer from high communication and/or computation overheads at sensor nodes to accommodate topology changes in the WSN. This paper proposes a novel scheme, called a Sensor Web (or S-Web), that organizes sensors into clusters based on their geographical location without requiring the sensors to have a Global Positioning System or actively locate themselves. The S-Web enables nodes to route data packets while consuming low energy in a decentralized manner. The model is self-organizing and distributed without the need of global network knowledge.