Information-Driven Task Routing for Network Management in Wireless Sensor Networks

摘要

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) consist of a large collection of small nodes providing collaborative and distributed sensing ability in unpredictable environments. Given their unattended nature, it is important for the routing algorithm in WSN to deal well with the node failures, resource depletion, and other abnormality. In this paper, an information-driven task routing (IDTR) is introduced for WSN with their specific application to network management. In WSN, a query for the location of the target may be launched from a proxy, which requires the network to collect and transfer the information to an exit node, while keeping the whole communication cost small. The proposed IDTR-based heuristic search algorithm evaluates the expected mutual information of the neighbor nodes, and selects the one that has the maximum information contribution and satisfies the constraint of communication cost as the next hop. In order to avoid the effects of any possible sensor holes, it will calculate the information contribution of all the M hop neighbor nodes to bypass the holes. Simulation results show that IDTR-based heuristic search algorithm achieves the tradeoff between the data communication cost and the information aggregation gain.