Conserving energy in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Routing in sensor networks is an area of research, with a still-limited but rapidly growing set of research results. Although many of these routing techniques look promising, there are still many challenges that need to be solved. Another interesting issue for routing protocols is node mobility. Most of the current protocols assume that the sensor nodes and the base station are stationary. However, there might be situations such as battle environments where the base station and possibly the sensors need to be mobile. In such cases, the frequent update of the position of the command node and the sensor nodes and the propagation of that information through the network may excessively drain the energy of nodes. New routing algorithms are needed in order to handle the overhead of mobility and topology changes in such energy-constrained environment.