Adaptive route discovery for wireless sensor networks

A wireless sensor network is composed of a sink node and numerous sensor nodes. Typically, the sink node issues commands and sensor nodes generate traffic for the commands. The commands can be broadcasted or unicasted according to application services. In the wireless sensor network, routes for data transmission can be set by broadcasting a control packet from the sink node. Among tiny sensor nodes the broadcasting for the route discovery is performed efficiently because the sensor nodes have insufficient resources and the broadcasting can spend large amount of energy. This paper proposes an adaptive route discovery scheme for wireless sensor networks. The proposed method determines a node that rebroadcasts the control packet from the sink node. By the rebroadcast nodes, a routing tree toward the sink node is constructed. The node selection is performed by distributed manner considering node's status (i.e., residual energy and connectivity).