ROP: A Resource Oriented Protocol for Heterogeneous Sensor Networks

Sensor networks have been an active area of research during the past several years. Much previous work deals with issues related to networks having homogenous sensor nodes. In reality, sensors with different radio coverage, power capacity, and processing capabilities are deployed. In addition, not all of the sensors are mobile or have the same mobility freedom or mobility attributes (e.g. speed). The architecture and routing protocol for this type of heterogeneous sensor network must be based on the resources and characteristics of their member nodes. In this paper, we propose a network model that is adaptively formed according to the resources of its members. A protocol named Resource Oriented Protocol (ROP) was developed to build the network model. This protocol principally entails two phases. In the topology formation phase, nodes report their available resource characteristics , based on which network architecture is optimally built . We stress that due to the existence of nodes with limitless resources, a top-down appointment process can build the architecture with minimum consumption of resources. In the topology update phase, mobile sensors and isolated sensors are accepted into the network with an optimal balance of resources. To avoid overhead of periodic route updates, we use a reactive strategy to maintain route cache. This paper provides encouraging simulation results of ROP in GlomoSim.