Relation-based Message Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks

Sensor networks and their related topics represent some of the greatest and challenging possibilities in the research field that have come about in recent years. Emerging technologies like wireless sensor network (WSN), standards enabled legacy sensors, ubiquitous and cloud computing, middleware, communication systems, internet protocols (IP) and next generation networks are leading to a set of new paradigms where wireless sensors can be treated as vital components of common infrastructure and a shared resource with an ability to serve multiple and concurrently executing applications run by various users in distributed environment. This is in strong contrast to traditional concepts where dedicated sensor devices are being physically and logically hard-wired to communication and computing infrastructure serving very specific and dedicated data/information processing applications. Wireless sensor networks consist of a number of small electronic devices (nodes) distributed in an area that by far exceeds the communication range of a single sensor. Message routing is one of the most important issues in such networks. This is mainly due to the large number of nodes, variety of possible communication paths, restricted power source and variability (in time and space) of environmental conditions in which the WSN operates. A shared communication channel and restricted communication ranges require that nodes of the WSN cooperate and/or coordinate their actions while messages are routed from nodes to the base station (BS). It is a well-known idea Descartes & Lafleur (1960) to solve large and complex problems by dividing them into smaller and possibly simpler tasks. The most crucial element of such an attempt is to decide how to divide the problem in order to get a problem that can be solved efficiently and, what is more important, can be used to find a solution to the original problem. A distributed system, such as a WSN, is traditionally seen as a set of spatially distributed nodes that communicate, coordinate their actions and inform other nodes about their status using special messages sent over the communication channel Dollimore et al. (2005). Such a system is usually assumed to be isolated from the outside word – even if it measures its parameters and/or listens to the status messages from other nodes, it is still not affected by the environmental conditions and its changes. We are going to look at such a system as it 7