Topology and Routing in Sensor Networks

At ALGOSENSORS 2004 we presented a first algorithm to detect the boundary in a dense sensor network. This has started a new field of research: how to establish topology awareness in sensor networks without using localization. Three years later, at ALGOSENSORS 2007, we present a number of further results. After discussing issues of distance estimation and computation of coordinates, we give an overview over the boundary recognition problem and show a new approach to solving it. Then we show how to use the boundaries for higher-order topology knowledge; the outcome is a graph that describes the network topology on a very high level, while being small enough to be distributed to all nodes. This allows every node in the network to obtain knowledge about the global topology. Finally, we show how to use these structures for efficient routing.