Dynamic Route Selection for Wireless Sensor Networks∗

With the decrease in the cost and size of computing devices, wireless sensor networks (WSNETs) have the potential to be grow to enormous numbers of nodes. To be of utility to evolving missions, such systems must have the ability to be tasked, retasked, and multiply tasked. To support this vision, we investigate the coexistence of multiple routing schemes targeted towards diverse tasks with a goal towards energy efficiency in routing. We posit that to fully tap into the potential of such networks a new routing infrastructure is needed that allows switching between different routing schemes dynamically as required by the applications being deployed, the conditions of the network as a whole, and the existing locality information. In this paper we shoe how dynamic routing scheme selection can be achieved when sensor networks are overlaid with a virtual attribute based cluster hierarchy. We present analytical results for our scheme and show the expected improvements achieved. ∗This work is supported by the NSF under grant No. CNS-0435353. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.