Autonomous configuration in wireless sensor networks

Because of the large scale of wireless sensor networks, the configuration needs to be done autonomously. In this paper, we present Scalable Data Collection (SDC) protocol, a tree-based protocol for collecting data over multi-hop, wireless sensor networks. The design of the protocol aims to satisfy the requirements of sensor networks that every sensor transmits sensed data to a sink node periodically or spontaneously. The sink nodes construct the tree by broadcasting a solicit packet to discover the child nodes. The sensor receiving this packet decides on an appropriate parent to which it will attach, it then broadcasts the same packet to discover its child nodes. Through this process, the tree is created autonomously without any flooding of the routing packets. SDC avoids periodic updating of routing information but the tree need to be reconstructed upon node failures or adding of new nodes. The states required on each sensor are constant and independent of network size, therefore SDC scales better than the existing protocols. Moreover, each sensor can make forwarding decisions regardless of the knowledge on geographical information. We evaluated the performance of SDC by using the ns-2 simulator and comparing with Directed Diffusion, DSR, AODV, and OLSR. The simulation results demonstrate that SDC achieves much higher delivery ratio, shorter delay, as well as high scalability in various scenarios.