SubCast: A distributed addressing and routing system for large scale wireless sensor and actor networks

Wireless sensor and actor networks (WSANs) are made up of a large number of sensing devices which are resource-impoverished nodes and powerful actuation devices: both are equipped with computation and communication capabilities. These devices cooperate to manage sensing and perform acting tasks. Numerous work conducted in the field of WSANs assumes the existence of addresses and routing infrastructure to validate their proposals. However, assigning addresses and delivering detected events in these networks remains highly challenging, specifically due to the sheer number of nodes. To address these issues, this paper proposes SubCast, a novel distributed address assignment and routing scheme based on a topic clustering system and fractal theory iterated function systems. In order to minimize data delivery costs among actors, the proposed architecture first builds an actor overlay network before allocating addresses to network nodes. Location information in the allocated addresses allows establishing data delivery paths. Simulation results confirm that the proposed system efficiently guarantees the allocation of unique addresses and performs efficient data delivery while reducing communication costs, delays as well as the impact of imprecise locations. 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.