Energy-Efficient Self-Organization in Wireless Sensor Networks

The concept of self-organization defined as global behavior emerging from local interactions [1] is applied to multihop wireless networks. Because of their specific constraints, selforganizing solutions for ad-hoc networks can not be applied as such to Wireless Sensor Networks. Solutions for ad-hoc networks often include some form of clustering. Yet, building and maintaining such a structure seems too energy consuming in the context of low-power low-throughput wireless sensor networks. Geographic-routing protocols do not maintain a structure, but still can guarantee delivery. Moreover, as the radio interface accounts for most of the energy depleted in a sensor, it is essential to couple this layer 3 protocol with an energy-efficient MAC protocol. The goal of this paper is to present the resulting energy efficient cross-layered self-organizing architecture.